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CITIES AND SEA-COASTS 
AND ISLANDS 



BY THE SAME WRITER 



Figures of Several Centuries. 1916. 

Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes). 1902. 

The Symbolist Movement in Literature. 1899. 

Cities. 1903. 

Spiritual Adventures. 1905. 

Studies in Seven Arts. 1906. 



CITIES AND 

SEA-COASTS AND 

ISLANDS 



BY 



ARTHUR SYMONS 

AUTHOR OF "TRISTIAN AND ISEULT," ETC. 




NEW YORK 

BRENTANO'S 

1919 



y,ij\ 



c^a. 



tfU 



Copyright, 1918, by Brentano's 



The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass., U. S. A. 



DEC 16 1918 



'CI.A508594 



TO 

AUGUSTUS JOHN 



Contents, 

I. Spain : 

Seville 3 

The Painters of Seville 24 

Domenico Theotocopuli : A Study at 

Toledo 49 

The Poetry of Santa Teresa and San 

Juan de la Cruz 64 

Campoamor 82 

A Spanish Poet : Nuiiez de Arce ... 94 

Moorish Secrets in Spain 100 

Valencia 106 

Tarragona 114 

Cordova 119 

Montserrat : 122 

Cadiz 127 

A Bull Fight at Valencia : 131 

Alicante 138 

A Spanish Music-Hall 145 

II. London: A Book of Aspects 159 

III. Sea-Coasts and Islands : 

Dieppe, 1895 227 

A Valley in Cornwall 249 

vii 



Contents 



At the Land's End 265 

Cornish Sketches 274 

In a Northern Bay 295 

Winchelsea : An Aspect 298 

The Islands of Aran 302 

In SHgo : Rosses Point and Glencar. . 328 

From a Castle in Ireland 340 

Dover Cliffs 345 



viu 



Spain. 



Seville. 



I. 



Seville, more than any city I have ever seen, is the 
city of pleasure. It is not languid with pleasure, 
like Venice, nor flushed with hurrying after pleasure, 
like Budapest ; but it has the constant brightness, 
blitheness, and animation of a city in which pleasure 
is the chief end of existence, and an end easily 
attained, by simple means within every one's reach. 
It has sunshine, flowers, an expressive river, orange 
groves, palm trees, broad walks leading straight into 
the country, beautiful, ancient buildings in its midst, 
shining white houses, patios and flat roofs and vast 
windows, everything that calls one into the open 
air, and brings light and air to one, and thus gives 
men the main part of their chances of natural 
felicity. And it has the theatres, cafes, shops, of 
a real city, it is not provincial, as Valencia is ; it is 
concentrated, and yet filled to the brim ; it has 
completely mastered its own resources. Life is 
everywhere ; there are no melancholy gaps, vacant 
spaces, in which a ruinous old age has its own way 
desolately, as in most really picturesque cities ; as 
in Venice, for instance, which it resembles in so 
many points. It has room for itself, and it is not 
too large for itself. And in living gaily, and in 
the present, it is carrying on a tradition : it is the 
city of Don Juan, the city of Figaro. 

I am coming, more and more, to measure the 
charm of cities, at all events their desirability for 
living in, by the standard of their parks, pubhc 

3 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

gardens, and free spaces where one can be pleasantly 
unoccupied in the open air. I want the town, not 
the country, but I want the town to give me the 
illusion of the country, as well as its own char- 
acteristic qualities. Rome itself, without its villas, 
even Rome, would not be Rome ; and Seville, which 
is so vividly a town, and with so many of a town's 
good qualities, has the most felicitous parks, gardens, 
and promenades (with that one great exception) that 
I have ever found in a city. Gardens follow the 
river-side, park after park, and every afternoon 
Seville walks and drives and sits along that broad 
road leading so straight into the open country, 
really a Paseo de las Delicias, a road of trees and 
sunlight. Turn to the right or to the left, and you 
are in a quiet shadow, under lanes of orange trees 
and alleys of acacias. There are palms and there 
is water, and there are little quaint seats everywhere ; 
paths wind in and out, roses are growing in mid- 
winter, they are picking the oranges as they ripen 
from green to gold, and carrying them in the panniers 
of donkeys, and pouring them in bright showers 
on the ground, and doing them up into boxes. 
Great merchant vessels lie against the river-side, un- 
loading their cargoes; and across the park, on the 
other side of a wall, drums are beating, bugles 
blowing, and the green meadow-grass is blue and 
red with soldiers. In the park, girls pass wrapped 
in their shawls, with roses in their hair, grave and 
laughing; an old gardener, in his worn coat with 
red facings, passes slowly, leaning on his stick. You 
4 



Seville. 

can sit here for hours, in a warm quiet, and with 
a few dry leaves drifting about your feet, to remind 
you that it is winter. 

Seville is not a winter city, and during those 
months it seems to wait, remembering and expectant, 
in an acquiescence in which only a short and not 
uneasy sleep divides summer from spring. To the 
northern stranger, its days of sunshine and blue sky 
seem to make winter hardly more than a name. 
Sun and air, on these perfect winter afternoons, have 
that rare quality which produces what I should like 
to call a kind of active languor. The sharpening 
of a breath, and it would become chill ; the deepen- 
ing of the sunshine, and it would become oppressive. 
And just this difficult equilibrium, as it seems, of 
the forces of summer and winter, adds a zest to 
one's contentment, a kind of thankfulness which 
one does not find it needful to feel in the time of 
summer. How delightful to sit, perfectly warm, 
under a tree whose leaves are scattered about the 
ground, yellow with winter; to watch the bare 
branches, among these always green palms and 
orange trees, remembering winter in the North. 

But to enjoy sympathetically all that Seville, even 
in winter, can be to its own people, it is not enough 
to go to the parks and the Paseo ; one must go, on 
a fine Sunday afternoon, to the railway line which 
stretches onwards from the Barqueta, along the 
river-side, but in the opposite direction. The line 
is black with people, at one hour going, at another 
hour returning, an unending stream which broadens 

5 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and scatters on both sides, along the brown herbage 
by the river, and over the green spaces on the 
landward side. At intervals there is a little venta, 
there are bowling-alleys, swings, barrel-organs, con- 
certinas, the sound of castanets, people dancing, 
the clapping of hands, the cries of the vendors of 
water, shell-fish, and chestnuts, donkeys passing 
with whole families on their backs, families camping 
and picnicking on the grass, and ever;ywhere chairs, 
chairs on the grass, two sitting on each chair, in a 
circle about the dancers, as they dance in couples, 
alternately; chairs and tables and glasses of man- 
zanilla about the ventas ; and always the slow 
movement of people passing, quietly happy, in a 
sort of grave enjoyment, which one sees in their 
faces when they dance. Here is the true pueblo, 
the working-people, cigarreras, gipsies, all Triana 
and the jMacarena ; and could people amuse them- 
selves more simply or more quietly, with a more 
enjoyable decorum : As they turn homewards, in 
another long black line, the sun is setting; a 
melancholy splendour bums down slowly upon the 
thin trees across the water, staining the water with 
faint reflections, and touching the dreary, colourless 
shrubs along the river-side with delicate autumn 
colours, as sunset ends the day of the people. 



II. 

There are seven hundred streets in Seville, and 
there is hardlv a street which has not some personal 
6 



Seville. 

character of its own, or which does not add one 
more Hne to the elaborate arabesque of the city. 
One of my favourite aspects, for it is an aspect from 
which Seville looks most Eastern, is at just that 
point of the Paseo de Catalina de Rivera where it is 
joined by the Calle San Fernando. One sees the 
battlemented outer wall of the Alcazar, with its low, 
square towers, the Giralda, the brown turrets of 
two or three churches, and then nothing but white 
walls and brown roofs, with a few bare branches 
rising here and there delicately against the sky, 
between the sharp, irregular lines of the houses, all 
outlined in bright white. One can fancy a whole 
Kremlin or Hradcin clustered inside that low, 
white, battlemented wall ; outside which the dreary 
Paseo, and the dim green of the Prado San Sebastian, 
seem to be already the country. 

And it is from this point too, as one turns home- 
ward from the river-side, that evening seems to come 
on most delicately : those sunsets of blue and rose 
and gold, as the sun goes down across the Gua- 
dalquivir, and that rosy flush which encircles all 
Seville after the sun has gone down, as if the city 
lay in the hollow of a great shell, tinged with rose 
at the edges. It is at just this hour that Triana 
looks its best, heaped somewhat irregularly on the 
other bank, in a long, white and pink line, above 
the brown slime ; and from the Triana bridge, always 
crowded with lean, beaten horses, dragging too 
heavy loads, and lines of white donkeys with panniers, 
nodding their jingling heads, as they wander along 

7 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

by themselves, one sees the whole river, and the 
Moorish Tower of Gold, and the crowded masts, 
changing colour as the light changes moment by 
moment. 

The streets of Seville are narrow, for shade in 
the summer and warmth in the winter, and many 
of them, like the central Calle Sierpes, with its 
shops, and clubs, and cafes, a street of windows, 
are closed to wheels. Every house has its balconies, 
and the older ones their barred windows on the 
ground floor ; and every house has its patio, that 
divine invention of the Moors, meant, certainly, for 
a summer city, and meant, as one sees it in Morocco, 
for houses without windows, in which all the light 
comes from the open roof above an inner court. 
The Spaniards have both patios and windows, for 
summer and winter, in their wise, characteristic 
passion for light. All the doors, leading to the 
patio, are of open iron-work, no two doors alike, 
in their surprisingly varied, and often exquisite, 
arabesques of pattern. This throwing open of one's 
house to the street, yet with an iron door, always 
closed, setting a boundary to the feet if not to the 
eyes, seems to me again characteristic of these 
natural, not self-conscious people, who seem often 
so careless of their own dignity and liberty, and 
are so well able to preserve them. 

Seville lights up for a feast-day as a face lights 
up with a smile. The night before the great feast 
of the Immaculate Conception, I went into the 
streets to find the whole place transformed, glittering. 
8 



Seville. 

Crimson or white and blue cloths were thrown over 
balconies, rows of lamps and candles burned above 
them, and between the Hghts eager faces leaned 
over, looking down at the eager faces looking up 
at them. The public squares were brilliant with 
light, and the whole place became suddenly filled 
with people, passing to and fro in the Sierpes, and 
along the streets of shops, which I hardly recognised, 
so brilliantly lighted were all the windows. The 
transformation seemed to have been done in a 
minute, and here was the true Seville, idle, eager, 
brilliant, moving gaily, making the most of the 
world on the Church's terms of felicity for the 
other world. 

And yet this, if the true Seville, is not all Seville, 
and I found another, silent, almost deserted city, 
which fascinated me almost more than this living 
and moving one, whenever I wandered about at 
night, in streets that sank to sleep so early, and 
seemed so mysteriously quiescent, under the bright 
sky and the stars. Night passed rarely without 
my coming out of some narrow street upon the vast 
Plaza del Triunfo, which holds the Cathedral, its 
Pagan counterpart, the Giralda, the Alcazar, and 
the Lonja. The tall tower of the Giralda was 
always the first thing I saw, rising up, like the 
embodied forces of the delicate powers of the world, 
by the side of the Christian Cathedral. Seen from 
the proper distance, it is like a filigree casket that 
one could lift in the hand, as Santa Justa and Santa 
Rufina lift it, in Murillo's picture ; looking up from 

9 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

close underneath it, it is like a great wall hiding 
the stars. And the Moors have done needlework 
on a wall as solid as a Roman wall ; far finer work 
than that bastard splendour of the Alcazar, with its 
flickering lights, and illuminations like illuminations 
on parchment. 

Looking back at the Giralda and the Cathedral 
from the gateway of the Patio de las Banderas, one 
sees perhaps the finest sight in Spain. The Giralda 
stands motionless, and a little aloof; but by its side 
the vast, embattled magnificence of the Cathedral 
seems to change in every aspect, full of multiform 
life, ordered to a wonderfully expressive variety, 
throwing out new shoots in every direction, like a 
tree which grows into a forest in some tropical 
country, or like a city grouping itself about a citadel. 
It is full of the romantic spirit, the oriental touch 
freeing it from any of the too heavy solemnity of the 
Middle Ages, and suiting it to a Southern sky. 
Above all, it has infinitely varied movement : yes, 
as it seems to lean slightly from the perpendicular, 
all this vivid mass might be actually about to move, 
to sail away like a great ship, with all its masts and 
spread sails and corded rigging. 

III. 

Much of what is most characteristic in the men 
of Seville may be studied in the cafes, which are 
filled every evening with crowds of unoccupied 
persons, who in every other country would be 

lO 



Seville. 

literally of the working class, but who here seem 
to have endless leisure. They are rough-looking, 
obviously poor, they talk, drink coffee, buy news- 
papers and lottery tickets, and they are all smoking. 
They fill rows of tables with little companies of 
friends ; they are roughly good-humoured, affection- 
ately friendly with one another ; and their conversa- 
tion echoes under the low ceiling with a deafening 
buzz. The typical Andalusian, as one sees him 
here, is a type quite new to me, and a type singu- 
larly individual. He is clean-shaved, he wears a 
felt hat with a broad flat brim, generally drab or 
light grey, clothes often of the same colour, and 
generally a very short coat, ending where a waist- 
coat ends, and very tight trousers ; over all is a 
voluminous black cloak lined at the edges with 
crimson velvet. He is generally of medium height, 
and he has very distinct features, somewhat large, 
especially the nose; a face in which every line 
has emphasis, a straight, thin, narrow face, a face 
without curves. The general expression is one of 
inflexibility, the eyes fixed, the mouth tight ; and 
this fixity of expression is accentuated by the 
arrangement of the hair, cut very short, and shaved 
around the temples, so as to make a sharp line 
above the ear, and a point in the middle of the 
forehead. The complexion is dull olive, and in old 
age it becomes a formidable mass of wrinkles ; by 
which, indeed, many of these old men with their 
clean-shaved cheeks, bright eyes, and short jackets, 
are alone to be distinguished from their sons or 

II 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

grandsons. There is much calm strength in the 
Andalusian face, a dignity which is half defiant, 
and which leaves room for humour, coming slowly 
up through the eyes, the mouth still more slowly 
lengthening into a smile; room also for honest 
friendliness, for a very inquiring interest in things, 
and very decided personal preferences about them. 
Often the face runs all to humour, and the man 
resembles a comic actor. But always there is the 
same earnestness in whatever mood, the same self- 
absorption ; and, talkative as these people are, they 
can sit side by side, silent, as if in brooding medita- 
tion, with more naturalness than the people of any 
other race. 

The Andalusian is seen at his finest in the bull- 
fighter, the idol of Seville, whom one sees at every 
moment, walking in the streets, sitting in his club, 
driving in his motor car, or behind his jingling team 
of horses, dressed in the tight majo costume, with 
his pig-tail drawn up and dissimulated on the top 
of his head, his frilled shirt with great diamond 
studs, his collar clasped by gold or diamond fasten- 
ings, diamond rings glittering on his well-shaped 
fingers. I once sat opposite one of the most famous 
toreros at a tahle-d'hote dinner, and, as I contrasted 
him with the heavy, middle-class people who sat 
around, I was more than ever impressed by the 
distinction, the physical good-breeding, something 
almost of an intellectual clearness and shapeliness, 
which come from a perfect bodily equipoise, a hand 
and eye trained to faultless precision. 

12 



Seville. 

The women of Seville are not often beautiful, 
but one of the most beautiful women I have ever 
seen was a woman of Seville whom I watched for an 
hour in the Cafe America, She had all that was 
typical of the Spaniard, and more ; expression, the 
equivalent of a soul, eyes which were not merely 
fine, but variable as opals, with twenty several 
delights in a minute. She was small, very white, 
with just that delicate hint of modelling in the 
cheeks which goes so well with pallor; she had 
two yellow roses in her black hair, at the side of 
the topmost coil, and a yellow shawl about her 
throat. One wished that she might always be 
happy. 

More often the women are comfortable, witty, 
bright and dark, guapa, rather than beautiful ; 
almost always with superb hair, hair which is like 
the mane or tail of an Arab horse, and always with 
tiny feet, on which they walk after a special, careful 
way of their own, setting down the whole foot at 
each step, level from heel to toe, and not rising on 
it. In Seville, more than anywhere else, one sees 
the Spanish woman already mature in the child, 
and nothing impressed me more than these brilliant, 
fascinating little people, at once natural and con- 
scious, with all the gestures of grown women, their 
way of walking, their shawls, and, in their faces, 
all that is finest in the Sevillana, a charm, seductive- 
ness, a sort of caressing atmosphere, and not merely 
bright, hard eyes, clean-cut faces, animation, which 
are to be seen everywhere in Spain. They have 

13 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

indeed that slightly preoccupied air which Spanish 
children affect, and which deepens, in some of the 
women, into a kind of tragic melancholy. Pass 
through the Macarena quarter in the eveningv 
and you will see not the least characteristic type 
of the women of Seville: strange, sulky, fatal 
creatures, standing in doorways, with flowers in 
the hair, and mysterious, angry eyes; Flamencas, 
with long, ugly, tragic, unforgettable faces, seeming 
to remember an ancestral unhappiness. 

There is a quality which gives a certain finish 
to Spanish women, and which is unique in them. 
It is a sort of smiling irony, which seems to pene- 
trate the whole nature : the attitude of one who 
is aware of things, not unsatisfied with them, 
decided in her own point of view, intelligent enough 
to be tolerant of the point of view of others, with- 
out coquetry or self-consciousness ; in fact, a small, 
complete nature, in which nothing is left vague or 
uneasy. It is a disposition such as this which goes 
to make life happy, and it is enough to have watched 
the gay, smiling, contented old women to realise 
that life is happy to most women in Spain. Look 
in all these faces, and you will see that they express 
something very definite, and that they express 
everything, while Northern faces have so much in 
them that is suggestion, or, as it seems to the 
Spaniard, mere indefiniteness. The Southern 
nature, for its material fehcity, has retained the 
Pagan, classic ideals; the Northern has accepted 
the unquiet, dreaming soul of the Middle Ages. 
14 



Seville. 

But in Spanish women, along with much childish- 
ness and much simplicity, there is often all the 
subtlety of the flesh, that kind of secondary spiritual 
subtlety which comes from exquisitely responsive 
senses. This kind of delicacy in women often 
stands in the place of many virtues, of knowledge, 
of intellect ; and, in its way, it supplies what is 
lacking in them, giving them as much refinement 
as knowledge or the virtues would have done, and 
itself forming a very profound kind of intelligence. 
I recognise it in the mournful pallor, and that long, 
immobile gaze, which seems to touch one's flesh, 
like a slow caress ; that cold ardour, which is the 
utmost refinement of fire. And these white people 
carry themselves like idols. Singularly diff"erent 
is that other Spanish kind of animality, where life 
burns in the lips, and darkens the cheeks as if with 
the sun, and bubbles in the eyes, the whole body 
warm with a somewhat general, somewhat over- 
ready heat. It is enough to have heard the laughter 
of these vivid creatures. It is the most delicious 
laughter in the world ; it breaks out like a song 
from a bird ; it is sudden, gay, irresponsible, the 
laughter of a moment, and yet coming straight 
from the deep unconsciousness of life. The Spanish 
woman is a child, but a mature Spanish child, know- 
ing much ; and in the average woman of Seville, 
in her gaiety, humour, passion, there is more than 
usual of the childHke quahty. Their faces are 
full of sun and shadow, often with a rich colour 
between Eastern and Western, and with the languor 

IS 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and keenness of both races ; with something in- 
toxicating in the quaUty of their charm, hke the 
scent of spring in their orange groves. They have 
the magnetism of vivid animal life, with a sharp 
appeal to the sensations, as of a beauty too full of 
the sap of life to be merely passive. Their bodies 
are so full of energy that they have invented for 
themselves a new kind of dance, which should tire 
them into repose ; they live so actively to their 
finger-tips that their fingers have made their own 
share in the dance, in the purely Spanish accom- 
paniment of the castanets. A dance is indicated 
in a mere shufile of the feet, a snapping of the fingers, 
a clapping of hands, a bend of the body, whenever 
a woman of Seville stands or walks, at the door 
of her house, pausing in the street, or walking, 
wrapped in many shawls, in the parks ; and the 
dance is as closely a part of the women of Seville 
as their shawls, the flowers in their hair, or the 
supplementary fingers of the fan. 

IV. 

A significant quality of the Andalusians is the 
profound seriousness which they retain, even when 
they abandon themselves to the most violent 
emotions. It is the true sensuality, the only way 
of getting the utmost out of one's sensations, as 
gaiety, or a facile voluptuousness, never can. The 
Spanish nature is sombre and humorous, ready to 
be startled into vivid life by any strong appeal : 
i6 



Seville. 

love, hate, cruelty, the dance, the bull-fight, what- 
ever is elemental, or touches the elemental passions. 
Seeing Seville as I did, in winter, I could not see 
the people under their strongest, most characteristic 
intoxication, the bull-fight ; but I had the oppor- 
tunity, whenever I went into the street, and saw a 
horse dragging a burden, of seeing how natural 
to them is that cruelty which is a large part of the 
attraction of bull-fighting. And their delight in 
violent sensations, sensations which seem to others 
not quite natural, partly perverse, partly cruel, as 
in the typical emotion of the bull-fight, is seen at 
Seville in the cuerpo de haile infantil which 
dances at the Cafe Suizo. These children of ten 
or eleven, who dance till midnight, learned in all 
the contortions of the gipsy dances, which they 
dance with a queer kind of innocence, all the more 
thorough in its partly unconscious method, and 
who run about in front, sitting on men's knees in 
their tawdry finery, smiling out of their little painted 
faces with an excited weariness ; is there not a 
cruelty to them, also, in the surely perverse senti- 
ment which requires their aid in one's own amuse- 
ment ? I shall never forget one particular dance 
of two children, one of the most expressive gipsy 
dances, danced in trailing dresses, inside which, as 
inside some fantastic, close prison or cage, they 
hopped and leaped and writhed, like puppets or 
living tops, to the stupefying rattle of castanets ; 
parodying the acts of physical desire, the coquetry 
of the animal, with an innocent knowingness, as if it 

17 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

were the most amusing, the most exciting of games. 
One of them was a httle, sallow, thin creature, with 
narrow eyes and an immense mouth, drawn almost 
painfully into a too-eager smile; a grimacing, 
Chinese mask of a child, almost in tears with nervous 
excitement, quivering all over with the energy of 
the dance. I went to see them, indeed, frequently, 
as I should have gone to see the bull-lights, and 
with the same mental reservation. They reminded 
me of the horses. 

All Spanish dancing, and d^ecially the dancing 
of the gipsies, in which it is seen in its most char- 
acteristic development, has a sexual origin, and 
expresses, as Eastern dancing does, but less crudely, 
the pantomime of physical love. In the typical 
gipsy dance, as I saw it danced by a beautiful 
Gitana at Seville, there is something of mere gamin- 
erie and something of the devil ; the automatic 
tramp-tramp of the children and the lascivious 
pantomime of a very learned art of love. Thus 
it has all the excitement of something spontaneous 
and studied, of vice and a kind of naughty innocence, 
of the thoughtless gaiety of youth as well as the 
knowing humour of experience. For it is a dance 
full of humour, fuller of humour than of passion ; 
passion indeed it mimics on the purely animal 
side, and with a sort of coldness even in its frenzy. 
It is capable of infinite variations ; it is a drama, 
but a drama improvised on a given theme; and it 
might go on indefinitely, for it is conditioned only 
by the pantomime, which we know to have wide 
i8 



Seville. 

limits. A motion more or less, and it becomes 
obscene or innocent; it is always on a doubtful 
verge, and thus gains its extraordinary fascination. 
I held my breath as I watched the gipsy in the 
Seville dancing-hall; I felt myself swaying un- 
consciously to the rhythm of her body, of her 
beckoning hands, of the glittering smile that came 
and went in her eyes. I seemed to be drawn into 
a shining whirlpool, in which I turned, turned, 
hearing the buzz of the water settling over my 
head. The guitar buzzed, buzzed, in a prancing 
rhythm, the gipsy coiled about the floor, in her 
trailing dress, never so much as showing her ankles, 
with a rapidity concentrated upon itself; her hands 
beckoned, reached out, clutched delicately, lived 
to their finger-tips ; her body straightened, bent, 
the knees bent and straightened, the heels beat on 
the floor, carrying her backwards and round ; the 
toes pointed, paused, pointed, and the body drooped 
or rose into immobility, a smiling, significant pause 
of the whole body. Then the motion became 
again more vivid, more restrained, as if teased by 
some unseen limits, as if turning upon itself in the 
vain desire of escape, as if caught in its own toils ; 
more feverish, more fatal, the humour turning 
painful, with the pain of achieved desire ; more 
earnest, more eager, with the languor in which 
desire dies triumphant. 

A less elaborate, less perverse kind of dancing 
is to be seen in the cafes, in little pantomimic 
ballets, imitated from French models, but done 

19 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

with a Spanish simpHcity of emphasis. There is, 
in such things, a frank, devil-may-care indecency, 
part of a boisterous hilarity, which has all the air 
of an accidental improvisation, as indeed it often 
is ; and this hilarity is tossed to and fro from stage 
to audience and from audience to stage, as if a crowd 
of lively people had become a little merry at the 
corner of a street. The Spanish (look at their 
comic papers) are so explicit ! It is not cold or 
calculated, Hke that other, more significant, kind of 
dancing; it is done with youth and delighted 
energy, and as among friends, and by people to 
whom a certain explicit kind of coarseness is natural. 



V. 

Seville is not a religious city, as Valencia is ; 
but it has woven the ceremonies of religion into its 
life, into its amusements, with a minuteness of 
adaptation certainly unparalleled. Nowhere as in 
Spain does one so realise the sacred drama of the 
Mass. The costumes, the processions, the dim 
lighting, the spectacular arrangement of the churches 
and ceremonies, the religious attitude of the people, 
kneeling on the bare stones, the penitent aspect of 
their black dresses and mantillas, intermingled with 
the bright peasant colours which seem to bring the 
poor people so intimately into association with the 
mysteries of religion : all this has its part in giving 
the Church its dramatic pre-eminence. And in 
Seville the ceremonies of the Church are carried 
20 



Seville. 

out with more detail, more spectacular appeal, 
than anywhere else in Spain, that is to say, more 
than anywhere in the world. All Europe flocks 
to see the celebrations of Holy Week, which must 
have come down unchanged from the Middle 
Ages ; a piece of immense mediaeval childishness, 
which still suits the humour of Seville perfectly. 
And it is not only in Holy Week that one may 
see the most characteristic of all these ceremonies, 
the sacred dances in the Cathedral, but also at the 
great feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is 
peculiarly a Sevillan feast. 

On that day, the 8th December, I attended Mass 
in the Cathedral. The gold and silver plate had 
been laid out by the side of the altar, crimson 
drapings covered the walls, the priests wore their 
terno celeste^ blue and gold vestments ; the 
Seises, who were to dance later on, were there in 
their blue and white costume of the time of Philip 
HI. ; the acolytes wore gilt mitres, and carried 
silver-topped staves and blue canopies. There 
was a procession through the church, the Arch- 
bishop and the Alcaldia walking in state, to the 
sound of sad voices and hautboys, and amidst clouds 
of rolling white incense, and between rows of 
women dressed in black, with black mantillas over 
their heads. The Mass itself, with its elaborate 
ritual, was sung to the very Spanish music of 
Eslava : and the Dean's sermon, with its flowery 
eloquence, flowers out of the Apocalypse and out 
of the fields of la Tierra de Maria Santisima, 

21 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

was not less typically Spanish. At five o'clock I 
returned to the Cathedral to see the dance of the 
Seises. There was but little light except about 
the altar, which blazed with candles; suddenly 
a curtain was drawn aside, and the sixteen boys, 
in their blue and white costume, holding plumed 
hats in their hands, came forward and knelt before 
the altar. The priests, who had been chanting, 
came up from the choir, the boys rose, and formed 
in two eights, facing each other, in front of the 
altar, and the priests knelt in a semicircle around 
them. Then an unseen orchestra began to play, 
and the boys put on their hats, and began to sing 
the coplas in honour of the Virgin : 

mi, mi amada 
Immaculada ! 

as they sang, to a dance-measure. After they had 
sung the coplas they began to dance, still singing. 
It was a kind of solemn minuet, the feet never 
taken from the ground, a minuet of delicate stepping 
and intricate movement, in which a central square 
would form, divide, a whole line passing through 
the opposite line, the outer ends then repeating one 
another's movements while the others formed and 
divided again in the middle. The first movement 
was very slow, the second faster, ending with a 
pirouette; then came two movements without 
singing, but with the accompaniment of castanets, 
the first movement again very slow, the second a 
quick rattle of the castanets, Hke the rolling of 
kettle-drums, but done without raising the hands 

22 



Seville. 

above the level of the elbows. Then the whole 
thing was repeated from the beginning, the boys 
flourished off^ their hats, dropped on their knees 
before the altar, and went quickly out. One or 
two verses were chanted, the Archbishop gave 
his benediction, and the ceremony was over. 

And, yes, I found it perfectly dignified, perfectly 
religious, without a suspicion of levity or indecorum. 
This consecration of the dance, this turning of a 
possible vice into a means of devotion, this bringing 
of the people's art, the people's passion, which in 
Seville is dancing, into the church, finding it a 
place there, is precisely one of those acts of divine 
worldly wisdom which the Church has so often 
practised in her conquest of the world. And it is 
a quite logical development of that very elaborate 
pantomime, using the word in all seriousness, 
which the ceremonies of the Church really are, 
since all have their symbolical meaning, which 
they express by their gestures. Already we find 
in them every art but one : poetry, the very sub- 
stance of the liturgy, oratory, music, both of voices 
and instruments, sculpture, painting, all the decora- 
tive arts, costume, perfume, every art lending its 
service; and now at last dancing finds its natural 
place there, in the one city of the world where its 
presence is most perfectly in keeping. 

Winter y 1898. 

23 



The Painters of Seville. 

Spanish art, before Velasquez discovered the world, 
is an art made for churches and convents, to the 
glory of God, never to the glory of earth. "The 
chief end of art," says Pacheco, the master of 
Velasquez, in his treatise on the art of painting, 
"is to persuade men to piety, and to raise them to 
God." In other countries, men have painted the 
Virgin and the Saints, for patrons, and because the 
subject was set them ; sometimes piously, and in 
the spirit of the Church ; but more often after some 
"profane" fashion of their own, as an excuse for 
the august or mournful or simple human presence 
of beauty. But in Spain pictures painted for 
churches are pictures painted by those to whom God 
is more than beauty, and life more than one of its 
accidents. The visible world is not a divine play- 
thing to them. It is the abode of human life, and 
human life is a short way leading to the grave. 
They are full of the sense of corruption, actual 
physical rotting away in the grave, as we see it in 
two famous pictures of Valdes Leal. And they 
have also a profound pity for human misery, that 
pity for the poor which is still one of the character- 
istics of the Spaniard ; their pictures are full of halt 
and maimed beggars, rendered with all the truth 
of a sympathy which finds their distortion a natural 
part of the world, a part to be succoured, not to be 
turned away from. But Heaven, the Saints, the 
Virgin, are equally real to them; and Murillo will 
paint the Trinity, without mystery and without 
24 



The Painters of Seville. 

dignity, with only a sense of the human closeness 
of that abstract idea to the human mind. Thus we 
have, for the most part, no landscapes, rarely an 
indication, even in a background, of external nature 
loved and copied, and brought into the picture for 
its own sake, as a beautiful thing. Seriousness, and 
absorption in human life, a mystical absorption in 
the divine life, these qualities are the qualities which 
determine the whole course of Spanish painting. 

Emotion, in the Spaniard, is based on a deep 
substratum of brooding seriousness ; some kind of 
instinctive pessimism being always, even in those 
untouched by religion, the shadow upon life. In 
Velasquez it is the intolerable indifference of nature, 
of natural fate, weighing upon those unhappy kings 
and princes whom he has painted, from their solemn 
childhood to their mature unhappiness. In Murillo 
it is a tragic intensity of ascetic emotion, the dark- 
ness out of which his sunlight breaks. In Zurbaran 
darkness swallows daylight, and his kneeling monk, 
contemplating the emptiness of life in the extrav- 
agant mirror of a skull, in the midst of a great 
void of night, shows us to what point this religious 
gloom can extend. Ribera lacerates the flesh of his 
martyrs, and tears open their bodies before us, with 
almost the passion of Goya's cannibal eating a 
woman. In Goya we see both extremes, the whole 
gamut from wild gaiety to sombre horror of the 
Spanish temperament. The world for him is a 
stage full of puppets, coloured almost more naturally 
than nature, playing at all the games of humanity 

25 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

with a profound, cruel, and fantastic unconscious- 
ness. Rarely indeed do we find a painter to whom 
the idea of beauty has been supreme, or who has 
loved colour for its own sake, or who has passion- 
ately apprehended ornament. The moment the 
sense of beauty is not concentrated upon reality, 
or upon vision which becomes reality, it loses pre- 
cision, passing easily into sentimentality, affectation, 
one form or another of extravagance. 

This overpoweringly serious sense of reality, 
human or divine, to which everything else is 
sacrificed, brings with it, to Spanish painters, many 
dangers which they have not escaped, and gives 
them at their best their singular triumphs. Their 
broad painting, with so little lingering over detail, 
except at times anatomical detail, their refusal to 
pause by the way over the seductions and delicate 
unrealities of beauty, point the way to the great 
final manner of Velasquez. Velasquez, we say, is 
life ; but life was what every Spanish painter aimed 
at, and some surprised, again and again, with fine 
effect. All these painters of Martyrdoms, and 
Assumptions, and Biblical legends, painted with a 
vivid sense of the reality of these things : their 
pictures tell stories, a quality which it is the present 
unwise, limited fashion to deprecate ; that is to say, 
they are always conscious of human emotion ex- 
pressing itself actively in gesture — Spanish gesture 
of course, which is very different from ours. Doubt- 
less there is no aim so difficult of attainment, so 
dangerous in intention, as this aim at fixing life, 
26 



The Painters of Seville. 

movement, and passionate movement, in a picture. 
Doubtless, also, for the perfect realisation of this 
aim, we have to wait for Velasquez, who sees the 
danger, and avoids it, as no one had yet perfectly 
succeeded in avoiding it, by an art wholly un- 
traditional, wholly of his invention. 

At Seville, where Velasquez was born, and did 
his early, perfunctory, religious painting, there is 
not a single example of his work, with the very 
doubtful exception of the small picture of the 
Virgin giving her mantle to Saint Ildefonso, which 
hangs in the private part of the Archbishop's Palace. 
But Velasquez, who was of Spanish and Portuguese 
origin, and who worked almost entirely for the 
Court, is not properly a Sevillan painter. The 
painters properly of Seville, those who were born 
there, or at no great distance, and did the main part 
of their work there, from Juan Sanchez de Castro 
in the fifteenth century, to Murillo and his im- 
mediate successors at the end of the seventeenth, 
can be seen very thoroughly, and can only be 
thoroughly seen, in the Museo and the churches 
of Seville. Out of Seville Murillo is an enigma, 
Alejo Fernandez is unknown. And in tracing the 
course of painting in Seville, we are not far from 
tracing the course of Spanish painting, so few are 
the painters, except the little group at Valencia, 
who were born out of Andalusia. 

Painting in Seville begins with pure decoration, 
in the three fourteenth-century frescoes of the 
Virgin; the Antigua in the chapel named after 

27 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

it in the Cathedral; Nuestra Senora del Corral^ 
in San Ildefonso ; and S. Maria de RocamadoTy 
in San Lorenzo. All three come from a wise and 
happy childhood of art, when painters were content 
with beautiful patterns, the solid splendour of gold, 
a Byzantine convention in faces, these long oval 
faces, with their almost Japanese outlines of cheek 
and eyebrows. S. Maria de Rocamador is larger 
than life-size, she wears a blue robe and a mantle 
of dull purple, spotted with golden stars and acorns, 
and bordered with gold braid; an arched or bent 
coronet is on her head, against the glowing halo ; 
she holds the child in her arms, and two little angels 
kneel on each side of her head. The background 
is all of gold, the Gothic gold, woven into a con- 
ventional pattern. It is a piece of pure convention, 
in which colour and pattern are felt delicately, as 
so much decoration. 

With the fifteenth century life comes playfully 
into this artificial paradise; and the first signed 
picture in Seville, the Saint Christopher of Juan 
Sanchez de Castro in San Julian, is a vast, humorous 
thing, reaching nearly to the ceiling, more than 
three times hfe-size, a child's dream of a picture. 
It is painted in all seriousness, and, so far as one 
can judge through bad repainting and subsequent 
rotting away of the plaster, painted with no little 
power. The Saint fills almost the whole of the 
picture ; he carries the child Christ on his shoulder, 
leaning on a pine tree, and the hermit comes out 
on shore with his lantern, in front of a little chapel, 
28 



The Painters of Seville. 

and looks into the darkness. The hermit reaches 
just above Saint Christopher's knee, and two pil- 
grims, with staves and cloaks and pilgrim bottles, 
are travelling along his girdle, as he wades in the 
deep water, which just covers his ankles. His face 
is naive and homely, with a certain pensiveness in 
the huge eyes ; and the child seems to hold in his 
hand the glove of the world, on which rises already 
the symbol of his cross. The whole picture, with 
its humour and yet solemnity, its childish sense of 
the natural wonder of a miracle, is a quite sincere 
attempt to render a scene supposed to have really 
happened, just as it might have happened. It 
may be contrasted with the other huge Saint 
Christopher in Seville, the fresco of Matteo Alessio 
in the Cathedral, where an Italian painter has 
done no more than paint an unconvincing picture 
of a miracle in which, it is evident, he had no more 
than the scene-painter's interest. 

Between Sanchez de Castro and his pupil, Juan ' 
Nunez, there is a wide interval; for Nunez, in the 
wooden panel in the Cathedral, a Pieta, is completely 
but very archaically Flemish, with quite another, 
more formal, more awkward, kind of childishness 
in design and colour. But he leads, quite naturally, 
to Alejo Fernandez, and in Alejo Fernandez we 
have almost a great painter, and a painter in whom 
Spanish painting in Seville first becomes conscious 
of itself, and capable of saying what it has to say. 
In some of his pictures an archaic stiffness has not 
yet freed itself from the golden bonds of that early 

29 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Gothic work of which his work so often reminds us ; 
but Flemish models showed him the way which he 
was seeking for himself; and, under that Northern 
influence, always so salutary for the Spanish tem- 
perament, he makes at last a new thing, profoundly 
his own. 

In the delicious Virgin of the Rose in the church 
of Santa Ana in Triana, we see those early Virgins 
of the fourteenth century growing human, but 
in the same embowering decoration of gold and 
stars. She sits with the child under a golden 
canopy in a robe of elaborate pattern, an almost 
Chinese pattern of leaves and stems, in pale gold 
on brown, and she holds a white rose in her hand. 
She holds out the rose to the child, who looks with 
serious, childish interest into the open pages of a 
brightly illuminated book. Two angels lean, a 
little awkwardly, on each arm of her chair ; but with 
a certain charm in their naive, pointed faces, in their 
bright gold curls falling over. Higher up two 
strange figures, probably cherubim, stand, arrested 
in flight, against the upper folds of the canopy. 
At the back there is a glimpse of rocky and wooded 
country in pale blue. A smaller picture in the same 
church shows another Virgin and Child with the 
same bright gold canopy, with little flying angels 
holding a coronet above the halo ; and here, too, 
in the pathetic eyes of the Virgin, in the child's 
gesture, there is the same humanity, coming not 
too sharply through a traditional form. In two 
other small pictures, the Adoration of the Magi and 
30 



The Painters of Seville. 

Saint Rufina and Saint Justina, we have this 
dehcate, just a httle fettered, sense of beauty; in 
the Virgin, meek, and with flowing golden hair; in 
the almost sly, Sevillan smile of the Patron Saint of 
the Giralda. There is always the same delight in 
colour and ornament : the bright swords and cloaks 
of the Magi, their golden goblets, the elaborate 
patterns of gold on brown in robes and cloaks ; and 
it is precisely this quality which we find so rarely 
in Spanish painters, never, indeed, quite thoroughly, 
except in the pictures of this one painter. 

In the church of St. Julian there is an altar-piece 
in eight divisions (of which one is a copy), telling 
many incidents in the life of the Virgin ; and in 
this series of pictures we see Alejo Fernandez under 
a somewhat different aspect, as a painter for whom 
the visible world exists, not only as beauty, but as 
drama. Natural feeling, a vivid and tender sim- 
plicity, a curious personal kind of sentiment, dis- 
tinguish these pictures, in which St. Joseph, for the 
most part no very active spectator in the events of 
the divine drama, is for once accepted as a natural, 
prominent actor in them. In one, the Virgin and 
St. Joseph kneel on either side of the newly-born 
child, with a serene, homely unity of devotion. In 
the Adoration of the Magi, Joseph leans over his 
wife's shoulder, his finger-tips set together, watching 
curiously. At the Circumcision, both hold the 
child before the priest. As Jesus goes up the steps 
of the Temple, to reason with the doctors, Joseph 
sits reflectively beside Mary. And at the end, after 

31 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

all is over, it is into Joseph's arms that Mary flings 
herself, her face distorted with sorrow; and it is 
mainly with solicitude for her that his face is sorrow- 
ful. Both grow old together, older in every picture, 
the hair whitening, the wrinkles forming in the face 
of Joseph ; and in every picture there is a simple, 
earnest attempt to tell the real story, with thought- 
fully and tenderly felt details. Whatever may still 
be at times conventional in the painting, as in the 
long oval face of the Virgin, there is no convention 
in the arrangement of the scene, the way of telling 
a story. 

In the large Adoration of the Magi, and in the 
three still larger pictures of the Birth and Purifica- 
tion of the Virgin and the Reconciliation of St. 
Joachim and St. Anne, of which the first is now in 
the Sagrario de los Calices, and the three others in 
almost impenetrable darkness in the Sacrista Alta 
of the Cathedral, we see united in the same com- 
position the half artificial beauty of the Virgin of 
the Rose and the dramatic sense and human sim- 
plicity of the altar-piece in San Julian. Here there 
is the same solid gold and elaborate raiment and 
jewelled magnificence : in the robes of the Magi, 
for instance, and the elaborately arranged hair of 
Melchior with its golden hair-pins ; but nowhere 
else has life come so directly into the picture. Jan 
Van Eyck might almost have painted the sombre 
and suffering face of Melchior under the golden 
hair-pins ; but it is Alejo Fernandez, now entirely 
master of his method, who has brought a new beauty 
32 



J 



The Painters of Seville. 

Into the face of the Virgin, as she kneels, in the very 
act of hfe, in one of the pictures done in her honour. 
Two serving-maids, in another of the series, have in 
them the whole warmth and brightness of Seville, 
and might have been painted from models of to-day. 
And there are grave, bearded faces, the face of 
Joseph, who stands beside Mary as the angel 
descends out of heaven, in which life has no less of 
the exact impress of life. Seeing these pictures as 
I did, point by point at the end of a candle and a 
bunch of tow, without the possibility of seeing them 
as a whole, I can only guess at how much I have 
lost, in compositions so finely imagined, so truthful 
and full of tender human feeling, and at the same 
time so gravely splendid in colour and decoration. 

Here, for all the influence of Flemish art and of 
the art of the unknown Spanish masters of the 
fourteenth century, we have an art essentially 
Spanish, going indeed beyond the usual Spanish 
limits in its delicate care for beauty. The Dutch- 
man Kempeneer, known in Spain as Pedro Campana, 
whose painting is almost contemporary with that 
of Alejo Fernandez, belongs to quite another world 
of form and sentiment, and in his attempt, as we are 
told, to imitate Michel Angelo, he becomes at times 
almost more Spanish than the Spaniards. His very 
vigorous, extravagant Descent from the Cross, in 
the Sacrista Mayor of the Cathedral, with its crude 
colour and powerful sense of action, was greatly 
admired and extravagantly praised by Murillo. At 
other times Campana shows us all his inequalities 

33 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

at a glance, as in the altar-piece in many compart- 
ments of the Capilla del Mariscal, where the meek 
and serious heads of the donors, painted with 
admirable Flemish realism in the lower compart- 
ments, contrast with the exclamatory, spectacular 
movement of the central scenes. I am quite unable 
to understand the enthusiasm which still exists in 
Spain for this painter, as I am unable to understand 
the enthusiasm which exists for his more interesting 
contemporary, Luis de Vargas. Just as I am told 
that Campana is the Spanish Michel Angelo, so 
Luis de Vargas, I am told, is the Spanish Raphael. 
Luis de Vargas had been a pupil of Perino del Vaga, 
perhaps of Raphael himself, and he brought back 
with him from Italy many secrets of painting and 
much of the manner of the men who came after 
Raphael. Much of his work has perished ; the 
famous frescoes have been washed off from the walls 
of the Giralda, leaving only a few faintly coloured 
traces of bishops' mitres and the outlines of kneeling 
figures. I was unfortunate in not being able to 
see his masterpiece, the Temporal Generation of 
Christ (known as La Gamba), and the pictures 
of the Altar del Nascimiento, so carefully had they 
been covered during the restoration of the Cathedral. 
The portrait of Fernando de Contreras, in the 
Sagrario de los Calices, is a serious study after 
nature, faithful to all the details of half-shaved 
cheeks and the like, hard, unsympathetic, not 
without character. But the large Pieta in Santa 
Maria la Blanca seemed to show me a thoroughly 

34 



The Painters of Seville. 

skilful, but an insincere painter, whom Italy had 
spoilt, as just then it was spoiling all Spanish art. 
Pacheco, in his Arte de la Pintura, tells us that Luis 
de Vargas was "a rare example of Christian painters," 
that he confessed and partook of the sacraments 
often, devoted a certain space of every day to 
religious meditation, "and, with the profound con- 
sideration of his death, composed his life ;" after 
his death, a hair shirt and scourge were found, 
asperisimos cilicios y disciplinas. His pictures preach, 
says Pacheco ; and indeed in this picture I am 
perfectly willing to believe in his religious sincerity, 
but I cannot believe in his artistic sincerity. The 
painting is flat and smooth, the composition elegant, 
with a curious mingling of Raphaelesque sweetness 
with extreme realism, as in the careful anatomy of 
the dead Christ, ghastly in death, showing the stains 
of blood, the falling open of the mouth, the darken- 
ing of the flesh of the feet. Here, the piety of the 
feeling, the aim at telling a story, at rendering a 
scene with dramatic emphasis, have produced only 
unreality ; it is academic, not emotional ; we see 
only an effect that has been aimed at, and indeed 
skilfully realised, not a story that has been told for 
its own sake, as it might have happened. 

The influence here is Raphael ; in el divino 
Morales, a painter in whom religion seems to 
darken into fanaticism, we see a more personal 
originality evolving itself from a very eclectic train- 
ing. In his early pictures, none of which are to be 
seen in Seville, but of which the Prado has a charming 

35 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Virgin and Child and a Presentation in the Temple, 
there is a certain naivete, a pale Italian elegance. 
Later on, as he becomes himself, the colouring 
darkens, the composition hardens, the emphasis of 
expression becomes painful, the anatomical minute- 
ness of this lean, brown flesh is like that of the early- 
Flemish painters, or like that of German wood- 
carvers ; might indeed almost be carved out of 
brown wood. In such pictures as the triptych in 
the Cathedral, or as the Pieta in the Bellas Artes at 
Madrid, in all his figures of the Man of Sorrows 
and the Mother of Sorrows, everything is sacrificed 
to an attempt to express superhuman emotion, and, 
among other qualities, the "modesty of nature" is 
sacrificed, so that a too intense desire of sincerity 
becomes, as it is so liable to do, a new, poignant kind 
of aff'ectation. Intensity of sentiment in these faces 
is like a disease, sharpening the lineaments and 
discolouring the blood, and putting all the sufi^ering 
languidness of fever into the eyes. They grimace 
with sorrow more violently than the sorrowful faces 
of Crivelli, or the most violent German emphasis ; 
literally they sweat blood, they have all the physical 
disgrace of pain ; they are no longer persons, but 
emblems, the emblems of the divine agony, as it 
appears to the pious Spaniard, whom it pleases to 
see the stains of blood on his crucifix. 

In passing from Morales to el clerigo Roelas, 
the sharpness of the contrast is slightly broken by 
Pedro Villegas Marmolejo, who, in his pictures in 
the Cathedral and in San Pedro, works very quietly 

36 



The Painters of Seville. 

under Italian influence, not without charm, though 
without originahty. In Juan de las Roelas, who 
is thought to have studied at Venice, the Italian 
Renaissance has done all it can do for Spanish 
painting. Venetian in his soft warmth of colour, 
in the suavity of his handling, Roelas is thoroughly 
Spanish in his profound religious sentiment (he 
was a priest, and died Canon of Olivares) and in 
his simple and vigorous sense of human incident. 
There is careless brushwork in his paintings, 
spaces are sometimes left uncared for, the composi- 
tion is at times a little awkward or a little con- 
ventional. . But he has feeling, both poetical feeling 
and feeling for reality, all through his work, even 
when he is least concentrated ; and at his best he 
anticipates Murillo, not unworthily, in what is 
after all only a part of his originality. In the 
Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, in the Museo, he is 
a realist ; life abounds in those sturdy, deeply 
coloured figures, who work or watch so earnestly, 
with so little sense of the spectator. In the Death 
of S. Isidore, in the church dedicated to that Saint, 
the earnest, homely, expressive people who stand 
about the dying Saint are thoroughly Spanish people, 
and they are absorbed in what is happening; not, 
as in the Pieta of Luis de Vargas, in what we are 
thinking of them. And this group on earth melts 
imperceptibly, almost in the manner which is to 
be Murillo's, into a heavenly group, lifted on 
vague, lighted clouds : child angels, and angelic 
youths, singing and playing on guitars, and above, 

37 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Christ and Mary, who wait with crowns of gold 
and flowers, and calm angels at their side. In 
one section of an altar-piece in the University 
Church, the Blessing of the Infant Christ, the same 
elegant, softly coloured figures bring in the same 
celestial gaiety, in these flights of singing and 
playing angels with harp, viola, and guitar, out of 
a golden open heaven, a cloud of delicate young 
faces. And in the picture of St. Anne and the 
Virgin, in the Museo, there is a singular gentle- 
ness and repose, certainly more Italian than Spanish. 
The Virgin kneels at her mother's side reading 
out of a book, doubtless the prophecy of her own 
honour. She is crowned with a jewelled coronet, 
over the flower in her hair, and wears many rings 
and jewelled bracelets, and pearls sewn in the 
border of her dress ; St. Anne, after the fashion 
of Seville, wearing many shawls, of diff"erent colours. 
Angels crowd the space above them, looking out 
of warm clouds, as Murillo's are to look, but with 
less of his celestial atmosphere, less power of dis- 
tinguishing vision, in painting, from real life. In 
front of St. Anne's chair, over which hangs a 
crimson curtain, is a little cabinet, the drawer open, 
showing linen and lace; a dog and cat, a very 
natural cat, lie together in front, with a work- 
basket near them. I find myself tiring a little of 
Roelas, as I see picture after picture representing 
incidents in the lives of the Saints, always capably, 
with natural sentiment and natural grace, but rarely 
with any great intensity; here, in what is after all 
38 



The Painters of Seville. 

his exceptional manner, and a manner which gave 
offence to his contemporaries, notably Pacheco, 
from the naive intimacy of its detail, he paints a 
placid scene with a full sense of its beauty and of 
its beautiful opportunities. 

One of the compartments of the altar-piece in 
the University Church, an Adoration of the Shep- 
herds, by Francisco Varela, a pupil of Roelas, 
shows the influence of Roelas on a more sombre 
nature. It is singularly original in its effects of 
light and shadow : the stormy background, middle 
darkness and sudden light above the manger 
roofed with a brood of angels. There is both 
realism and a sense of beauty in the earnest group 
in the foreground, the Andalusian shepherd with 
a lamb on his shoulders, the inexplicable woman, 
half undraped and half in armour, who presents a 
book of music to the laughing child. Another 
and more famous follower of Roelas, Francisco 
Herrera, scarcely chooses what is best in his master 
to imitate, in his "furious," too vehemently Spanish 
way. There are two huge pictures of Herrera 
in the Museo, one on each side of the Martyrdom 
of Saint Andrew; in the earlier of the two, the 
St. Hermengild, vigorous as it is, the sincerity and 
simplicity of Roelas have already gone, the Saint 
is an operatic tenor, every figure poses ; in the 
later, St. Basil, all is splash-work, extravagant 
contortion, and hectic light and shadow. 

It was from Herrera that Velasquez took his 
first lessons, before he became the pupil of Francisco 

39 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Pacheco, an Italianised painter, whose series of 
pictures in the Museo, the Legend of S. Pedro 
Nolasco, has at least a certain quietude, flat, almost 
colourless though they are. Pacheco was a better 
writer than painter, and his Arte de Pintura, pub- 
lished at Seville in 1646, is full of interesting theory 
and detail. He is a strict traditionalist, and finds 
a religious basis for the colours of pictures, the 
position of Saints in them, and reasons of "the 
different kinds of nobility that accompany the art 
of painting, and of its universal utility." He 
was chosen by the Inquisition as censor of pictures, 
an office which he held with more impartiality 
than some of his theories would seem to imply. 
He even learnt to put a certain naivete which is 
almost naturalness into his later pictures, perhaps 
from the example of his pupil, of whose virtudy 
limpieza y buenas partes, y de las esperanzas de su 
natural y grande ingenio he speaks with such hearty 
enthusiasm; finding in "his glory the crown of 
my later years." Pacheco's pictures in the Museo 
gain from their position, for by their side are the 
coloured lithographs of Juan de Castillo, the master 
of Murillo, and one of the worst painters who 
ever lived. Alonso Cano, architect, sculptor, and 
painter, who studied under Montanes and Pacheco, 
has been admirably defined by Lord Leighton as 
*'an eclectic with a Spanish accent." There are 
many of his charming, facile pictures in Seville; 
and in one of them, the Purgatory in the Museo, 
he is for once almost wholly Spanish, as he is in 
40 



The Painters of Seville. 

the curious, half caricature pictures of Visigothic 
Kings, in the Prado at Madrid. It is a panel 
representing souls burning in red flames ; four 
men and two children, with others seen shadowily, 
lifting their hands, not without hope, out of the 
burning. It is a simple, dreadful realisation of a 
dreadful dogma ; it gives, without criticism, all 
the cruelty of religion. 

Francisco Zurbaran, in the thirty or forty pic- 
tures of his which are to be seen in Seville, sums 
up almost everything I have said of the typical 
characteristics of Spanish painting; and yet, after 
all, remains a passionate mediocrity, in whom I 
find it impossible to take any very personal interest. 
The Museo contains three of his largest, most 
notable pictures, the Virgin de las Cuevas, the 
Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Car- 
thusian Monks at Table ; yet even in these pictures 
I find something hard, unsympathetic in his touch, 
as he tells his story so adequately, So pointedly, 
and with singular honesty in its emphasis. They 
have all his solid, uninspired care for formal outline 
and expression, expression counting for so much 
and colour for so little ; though the Apotheosis 
has, for once, caught a little of the warmth of 
Roelas, of whom Zurbaran was a visitor, if not a 
pupil. The monks, like all his monks, seem to 
be reflected in a mirror suddenly placed in their 
cell or refectory; they have the very attitude of 
life, letting something of a burning inner life come 
through into their faces ; and yet, on these canvases 

41 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

without atmosphere, they are not ahve. Zurbaran 
achieves reahsm without attaining Hfe. He shows 
us people, copied from hfe, in whom we discern a 
brooding emotion ; but he paints them without 
emotion. His severe and lady-hke Saints in the 
Hospital Civil, in their fantastic dresses, with their 
fixed air of meditation, are like Gothic statues painted 
upon canvas. When he aims at an emotional 
rendering of emotion, a very Spanish kind of in- 
sincerity comes in, and he paints pictures like the 
extravagant female saint in the Sacristia Mayor, 
seated in a false ecstasy before a book and a skull. 
His Crucifixions, in which a certain intensity finds 
precisely the motive which it can render with all 
the hard, motionless truth of his natural manner, 
are scarcely to be called extravagant, if the horror 
of that death is to be painted at all. Here the 
painter of monks puts into his canvas for once a 
kind of desperate religious ecstasy. 

There is something of the spirit and manner of 
Zurbaran in the early realistic pictures of Murillo, 
in the San Leandro and San Bonaventura of the 
Museo, for instance. Another early picture, an 
Annunciation, painted in the estilo frio, shows us a 
precisely Sevillan type in the almost piquant Virgin, 
black-haired, and with the acute hard eyes of 
Spanish women. In an Adoration of the Shepherds 
in the Museo, the dark young shepherd, who has 
come first to the manger, looks at the divine child 
with a frank, unrestrained, delightfully natural 
curiosity, fairly open-mouthed, with the honest 
42 



The Painters of Seville. 

peasant stare of amazement. In the Last Supper^ 
in Santa Maria la Blanca, with its passionate energy 
of characterisation, Murillo is almost purely realistic, 
realising the scene, certainly, with perfect natural- 
ness. But from the beginning, and through all 
his changes, his pictures live. There is not an 
example in Seville of what is most familiar to us in 
his work, the genre pictures, the somewhat idealised 
beggar-boys. But, with this scarcely important 
exception, we see in Seville, and we can see only in 
Seville, all that it is important to us to see of his 
work. Among the six pictures which still hang 
in the places for which they were painted, in the 
church of that Hospital de la Caridad founded by 
Don Miguel Maiiara, the original Don Juan, as 
it is thought by many, are the large compositions. 
La Sed, and the Pan y Feces, in which Murillo 
shows his mastery of the drama of a large can- 
vas, in which many human figures move and 
group themselves in a broad landscape. In the 
Museo there are twenty-three -pictures, and 
among them the great Capuchin series ; in the 
Baptistery of the Cathedral there is the iS^. Anthony 
of Padua; and elsewhere, in churches, convents, 
and private collections, I know not how many 
further pictures, sometimes, like the Last Supper 
in Santa Maria la Blanca, painfully darkened, 
sometimes no more than a Christ painted rapidly 
on a wooden crucifix for a friendly monk. But 
in all these pictures, so unequal, and only gradually 
attaining a completely personal mastery of style, 

43 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

there is the very energy of hfe, Spanish Hfe, burning 
at the points of its greatest intensity. 

In Murillo the Spanish extravagance turns to 
sweetness, a sweetness not always to our taste, 
but genuine, national, and perfectly embodied in 
those pictures in which he has painted ecstasy as 
no one else has ever painted it. In the warm, 
mellow, not bright or glittering light of the St. 
Anthony of Padua, vision sweeps back the walls 
as if a curtain had been drawn aside before the 
kneeling monk, and the glory is upon him : the 
child, in all the radiance of divine infancy, as if 
leaping on clouds of golden fire, and about him a 
swirling circle of little angels, burning upwards to 
a brighter ardency, as if the highest point of their 
circle were lit by the nearer light of heaven. His 
colour, in these ecstatic pictures, is a colour one 
can fancy really that of joyous clouds about the 
gates of heaven, jewelled for the feet of Saints. 
And the little angels really fly, though they are 
otherwise perfectly human, and of the earth. The 
Virgin, too, has all the humanity of a young mother, 
as she leans out of embowering clouds, or treads 
on the globe of the earth, which whitens under her 
among drifting worlds. She is Fray Luis de 
Leon's 

Virgen del sol vesiida 

De luces eternales coronada, 

^ue huellas con divinos pies la luna, 

and yet her gestures are full of human warmth ; 
she lives there, certainly, as vividly, and with as 
44 



The Painters of Seville. 

much earthly remembrance, as at any time on the 
earth. 

The emotion of Murillo, in these pictures, is 
the emotion of the Spaniard as it turns passionately 
to religion. In such a picture as his own favourite, 
St. Thomas of Villanueva giving alms, he has created 
for us on the canvas a supreme embodiment of what 
is so large a part of religion in Spain, the grace and 
virtue of almsgiving, with the whole sympathetic 
contrast of Spanish life emphasised sharply in the 
admirable, pitying grace of the Saint, and the 
swarming misery of the beggars. In such others 
as St. Francis by the Cross and the St. Anthony 
of the Museo, we are carried to a further point, 
in which practical religion becomes mysticism, a 
mysticism akin to that of St. John of the Cross, 
in which the devout soul swoons "among the 
lilies." This mysticism finds its expression in 
these rapt canvases, in the abandonment of these 
nervous, feminine Saints to the sweetness of asceti- 
cism, in one to the luxury of supreme sorrow, in 
the other to the ecstasy of the divine childhood. 
It is precisely because these Saints of Murillo 
abandon themselves so unthinkingly, with so Spanish 
an abandonment, to their mystical contemplation, 
that they may seem to us, with our Northern senti- 
ment of restraint, to pose a little. In desert places, 
among dimly lighted clouds, that rise about them 
in waves of visible darkness, they are dreamers 
who have actualised their dreams, mystics who, 
by force of passionate contemplation, have attained 

45 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

the reality of their vision ; and the very real forms 
at which they gaze are but evocations which have 
arisen out of those mists and taken shape before 
their closed or open eyes. And indeed in these 
pictures, in which the Virgin appears in a burst of 
sunlight out of the darkness, treading on the dim 
world and the crescent moon, or in which the 
Trinity flashes itself upon St. Augustine as he 
writes, or in which Christ comes back to the cross 
for the sake of St. Francis or to the cradle for St. 
Anthony, all is vision, vision creating vision ; and 
the humanity in them is so real, because it is so 
powerfully evoked. Thought out of the void, 
with such another energy as that with which Rem- 
brandt thought his visions, more real than reality, 
out of burning darkness, these rise out of a softer 
shadow, through which the light breaks flower- 
like, or as if it sang aloud. 

To turn from Murillo to Valdes Leal is like 
passing from the service of the Mass in a cathedral 
to a representation of Mass in a theatre. He paints, 
indeed, eff'ectively, but always for eff'ect. His 
painting is superficial, and has the tricks of modern 
French painters. Shadowy figures float in the air, 
apparitions seen as the vulgar conceive them, as 
insubstantial things ; showy, dressy women parade 
in modern clothes ; worldly angels twist in elegant 
attitudes, the same attitude repeated in two pictures. 
Even the picture of St. John leading the three 
Maries to Calvary, which has movement, and may 
at first seem to have simple movement, does not 
46 



The Painters of Seville. 

bear too close a scrutiny : the figures grow conscious 
as one looks at them. Drama has become theatrical, 
and his St. Jerome in the wilderness, flinging his 
arms half across the canvas, with the French ladies 
about him, and a thunderstorm in the distance, is 
far indeed from the honest dramatic sense of Roelas. 
He is expressive, certainly, but he would express 
too much, and with too little conviction. In his 
altar-piece in the church of the Carmen at Cordova, 
done before he came to Seville, an immense picture 
in eleven compartments, architecturally arranged, 
giving the history of Elijah, there is a certain 
absorption in his subject, which gives him, indeed, 
opportunities for his too theatrical qualities, fire 
breaking out of the wheels of the chariot and the 
manes and tails of the horses, and out of the sword 
with which Elijah has slain the prophets of Baal. 
He did not again achieve so near an approach to 
spontaneity in extravagance. In his two famous 
pictures in the Caridad, at which Murillo is said 
to have held his nose, the Spanish macahre is carried 
to its utmost limits. In one a skeleton with one 
foot on the globe tramples on all the arts and in- 
ventions of man ; the picture is inscribed In ictu 
oculi. In the other a rotting bishop lies in his 
broken coffin by the side of a rotting knight, in a 
red and gloomy darkness ; the picture is inscribed 
Finis glories mundi. Both are horribly impressive, 
painted brilliantly, and with an almost literally 
overpowering vigour. They lead the way to other, 
feebler, later pictures, some of which may be seen 

47 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

in a side room at the Museo, where, for instance, a 
man in a black cloak contemplates a crowned skull 
which he holds in his hands, while a cardinal's red 
hat lies at his feet. Here Spanish painting, losing 
all its earnestness and simplicity, in its representa- 
tion of human life or of religious ecstasy, losing 
direction for its vigour, losing the very qualities 
of painting, becomes moralising, becomes em- 
blematical, dying in Seville a characteristic death. 

Winter, 1899. 



48 



Domenico Theotocopuli: 
A Study at Toledo. 

An entry in the books of the church of Santo Tome 
at Toledo, recently discovered, tells us that Do- 
menico Theotocopuli died on April 7, 1614, and 
was buried in the church of Santo Domingo el 
Antiguo : En siete del Ahril 1614, falescio Dominico 
Greco. No hizo testamento, recihio los sacramentos, 
enterose en Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Dio velas. 
The signature to a picture in the Escurial tells us 
that he came from Crete. We do not know the 
date of his birth ; we are told that he studied at 
Venice under Titian ; the earliest date which 
connects him with Toledo is 1577, when the chapter 
of the cathedral ordered from him the Disrobing 
of Christ, now in the sacristy. He is said to have 
been not only a painter, a sculptor, and an architect, 
but to have written on art and philosophy ; he was 
a fierce litigant on behalf of his art and his own 
dignity as an artist ; we are told of his petulance 
in speech, as in the assertion that Michel Angelo 
could not paint ; there are legends of his pride, 
ostentation, and deliberate eccentricity, of his wealth, 
of his supposed madness ; Gongora wrote a sonnet 
on his death, and Felix de Artiaga two sonnets on 
his own portrait and on the monument to Queen 
Margarita. The poet addresses him as Divino 
Griego and Milagro Griego; but the name by which 
he was generally known is the half-Spanish, half- 
Italian name. El Greco. One of the most original 
painters who ever lived, he was almost forgotten 

49 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

until the present century ; the unauthenticated story 
of his madness is still commonly repeated, not only 
by the sacristans of Toledo, and it is only quite lately 
that there has been any attempt to take him seriously, 
to consider his real position in the history of art and 
his real value as a painter. What follows is a per- 
sonal impression of those aspects of his work and 
temperament which I was able to note for myself 
in a careful study of his pictures in Spain, and 
chiefly of those at Toledo and Madrid. 

Theotocopuli seems to have discovered art over 
again for himself, and in a way which will suggest 
their varying ways to some of the most typical 
modern painters. And, indeed, I think he did 
discover his art over again from the beginning, 
setting himself to the problem of the representation 
of life and vision, of the real world and the spiritual 
world, as if no one had ever painted before. Perhaps 
it is rather, as the legends tell us, with an only too 
jealous consciousness of what had been done, and 
especially by Titian, whose pupil he is said to have 
been, and whose work his earliest pictures done 
in Spain are said to have resembled so closely that 
the one might actually have been mistaken for the 
other. Real originality is often deliberate origi- 
nality, and though the story is scarcely true, and 
though it was no doubt Tintoretto and not Titian 
whom he studied under, I should have seen no 
injustice to Theotocopuli in accepting the story. 
What it means chiefly is, that he saw a problem 
before him, considered it carefully on every side, 
SO 



A Study at Toledo. 

and found out for himself what was his own way 
of solving it. 

He goes back, then, frankly, to first principles : 
how one personally sees colour, form, the way in 
which one remembers expression, one's own natural 
way of looking at things. And he chooses, out of 
all the world of colour, those five which we see on 
his palette in his portrait of himself at Seville, white, 
vermilion, lake, yellow ochre, and ivory black, with, 
here as elsewhere, a careful limitation of himself 
to what he has chosen naturally out of the things 
open to his choice : style, that is, sternly appre- 
hended as the man. 

And he has come, we may suppose, to look on 
human things somewhat austerely, with a certain 
contempt for the facile joys and fresh carnations of 
life, as he has for the poses and colours of those 
painters of life who have seen life differently; for, 
even, Titian's luxurious loitering beside sumptuous 
flesh in pleasant gardens, and for the voluptuous 
joy of his colour. He wants to express another 
kind of world, in which life is chilled into a con- 
tinual proud meditation, in which thought is more 
than action, and in which the flesh is but httle 
indulged. He sees almost the spiritual body, in 
his search beyond the mere humanity of white and 
red, the world's part of coloured dresses, the attitudes 
of the sensual life. Emotion is somewhat dried 
out of him, and he intellectualises the warmth of 
life until it becomes at times the spectre of a thought, 
which has taken visible form, somewhat alarmingly. 

SI 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

And Toledo, too, has had its influence upon 
him, an influence scarcely to be exaggerated in the 
formation of his mind. TheotocopuH, it seems to 
me, is not to be understood apart from Toledo, the 
place to which a natural affinity brought him, the 
place which was waiting to develop just his particular 
originality. Toledo is one of the most individual 
cities in Europe. It is set on a high and bare rock, 
above a river broken by sounding weirs, in the 
midst of a sombre and rocky land. With its high, 
windowless walls, which keep their own secrets, 
its ascents and descents through narrow passage- 
ways between miles of twisting grey stone, it seems 
to be encrusted upon the rock, like a fantastic 
natural product ; and it is at the same time a museum 
of all the arts which have left their mark upon 
Europe. Almost the best Moorish art is to be 
seen there, mingled with much excellent Christian 
art ; and the mingling, in this strange place, which 
has kept its Arab virginity while accepting every 
ornament which its Christian conquerors have 
offered it, is for once perfectly successful. Winter 
and summer fall upon it, set thus naked on a 
high rock, with all their violence ; even in spring 
the white streets burn like furnaces, wherever a 
little space is left unshaded ; the air is parching, 
the dust rises in a fine white cloud. Walk long 
enough, down descending paths, until you hear the 
sound of rushing water, and you come out on a 
crumbling edge of land, going down precipitously, 
with its cargo of refuse, into the Tagus, or upon 
52 



A Study at Toledo. 

one of the sharply turning roads which lead down- 
wards in a series of inclined planes. On the other 
side of the ravine another hill rises, here abrupt 
grey rock, there shaded to an infinitely faint green, 
which covers the grey rock like a transparent 
garment. Every turn, which leads you to the 
surprise of the precipice, has its own surprise for 
you; there seem to be more churches than houses, 
and every church has its own originality, or it may 
be, its own series of originalities. If it had none 
of its churches, if it were a mere huddle of white 
and windowless Arab houses, like Elche, which it 
somewhat resembles, Toledo would still be, from 
its mere poise there on its desert rock, one of the 
most picturesque places in Spain. As it is, every 
stone which goes to make its strange, penetrating 
originality of aspect, has its history and possesses 
its own various beauty. To Theotocopuli, coming 
to this austere and chill and burning city of living 
rock from the languid waters of Venice, a new world 
was opened, the world of what is most essentially 
and yet exceptionally Spanish, as it can appeal, 
with all its strength, only to strangers. Toledo 
made Theotocopuli Spanish, more Spanish than the 
Spaniards. 

And Toledo was surely not without its influence 
in the suggestion of that new system of colour, 
teaching him, as it certainly would, to appreciate 
colour in what is cold, grey, austere, without 
luxuriance or visible brightness. The colour 
of Toledo is marvellously sharp and dim at 

S3 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

once, with an incomparable richness in all the 
shades to which stone can lend itself under 
weather, and in sun and shadow; it is a colour 
violently repressed, a thing to be divined, waited 
upon, seen with intelligence. It is amply defended 
against indifferent eyes : it shocks, and is subtle, 
two defences ; but there it is, the colour of Theo- 
tocopuli. 

In the Museo Provincial there is a bird's-eye view 
of Toledo by Theotocopuli which is the most fan- 
tastic landscape I have ever seen, like a glimpse of 
country seen in a nightmare, and yet, somehow, very 
like a real Toledo. It is done with a sweeping 
brush, with mere indications, in these bluish white 
houses which rush headlong downhill and struggle 
wildly uphill, from the phantom Tagus below to 
the rushing storm-sky above. The general tone 
is pale earthy green, colouring the hills on which 
the city rests, and intersecting the streets of pale 
houses, and running almost without a break into 
the costume of the youth in the foreground, who 
holds a map of the city in his hands, filling a huge 
space of the picture. Toledo itself is grey and 
green, especially as night comes on over the country, 
and the rocks and fields colour faintly under the 
sunset, the severity of their beauty a little softened 
by a natural effect which is like an effect in painting. 
It is just the effect of this phantasmal landscape; 
and, here again, all Toledo is in the work of Theoto- 
copuli, and his work all Toledo. Coming out from 
seeing his pictures in some vast, old, yellow church, 
54 



A Study at Toledo. 

into these never quite natural or lifelike streets, 
where blind beggars play exquisitely on their guitars 
in the shadow of a doorway, and children go barefoot, 
with flowers in their mouths, leading pet lambs, 
I seem to find his models everywhere : these dark 
peasants with their sympathetic and bright serious- 
ness, the women who wear his colours, the men 
who sit in the cafes with exactly that lean diminishing 
outline of face and beard, that sallow skin, and those 
fixed eyes. 

In his portraits, as we see them for the most 
part in the Prado at Madrid, there is a certain 
subdued ecstasy, purely ascetic, and purely tempera- 
mental in its asceticism, as of a fine Toledo blade, 
wearing out its scabbard through the mere sharpness 
of inaction. There is a kind of family likeness, a 
likeness, too, with his own face, in these portraits 
of Spanish gentlemen, in the black clothes and 
enveloping white ruff of the period : the lean face, 
pointed beard, deep eyes, thin hair, olive skin, the 
look of melancholy pride. Seen at a little distance, 
the black clothes disappear into the black back- 
ground ; nothing is seen but the eager face starting 
out of the white ruff, like a decapitated head seen 
in a dream. Their faces are all nerves, distinguished 
nerves, quieted by an effort, the faces of dreamers 
in action; they have all the brooding Spanish soul, 
with its proud self-repression. And they live with 
an eager, remote, perfectly well-bred life, as of people 
who could never be taken unawares, in a vulgar or 
trivial moment. In their tense, intellectual aspect 

SS 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

there is all the romantic sobriety of the frugal 
Spanish nature. 

Look for instance at the portrait of the man with 
a sword, his hand laid across his breast with a 
gesture of the same curious fixity as the eyes. 
Compare this portrait with the fine portrait by the 
pupil of Theotocopuli, Luis Tristan, through whom 
we are supposed to reach Velasquez. In Tristan 
there is more realism, a more normal flesh ; there 
is none of that spiritual delicacy, by which the colours 
of the flesh are dimmed, as if refined away by the 
fretting and consuming spirit. In the portrait by 
Theotocopuli, the light falls whitely upon the man's 
forehead, isolating him within a visionary atmos- 
phere, in which he lives the mysterious life of a 
portrait. He exists there, as if sucked out of the 
darkness by the pale light which illuminates his 
forehead, a soul and a gesture, a secret soul and a 
repressive gesture. 

And these portraits are painted with all the 
economical modern mastery of means, with almost 
as black and hard an outline as Manet, with strong 
shadows and significant indications of outline, with 
rapid suppressions, translations of colour by colour, 
decomposition of tones, as in the beautiful lilacs 
of the white flesh. Individuality is pushed to a 
mannerism, but it is a mannerism which renders a 
very select and vivid aspect of natural truth, and with 
a virile and singular kind of beauty. 

In the earliest pictures painted under the influence 
of the Venetian painters, as in the Disrobing of 
56 



A Study at Toledo. 

Christ in the sacristy of the cathedral at Toledo, 
there is a perfect mastery of form and colour, as 
the Venetians understood them; the composition is 
well balanced, sober, without extravagance. In the 
Assumption of the Virgin, over the high altar of 
Santo Domingo el Antiguo, there is just a suggestion 
of the hard black and white of the later manner, 
but for the most part it is painted flowingly, with a 
vigour always conscious of tradition, A Virgin of 
splendid humanity reminds me of one of the finest 
of Alonso Cano's wooden statues. The somewhat 
fiercely meditative saints in the side panels are at 
once Spanish and Italian; Italian by their formal 
qualities of painting, certainly Spanish by an in- 
tensity of religious ardour which recalls and excels 
Zurbaran. In the Adoration of the Shepherds and 
the Resurrection, in the same church, we see already 
sharp darknesses of colour, an earthly pallor of flesh, 
a sort of turbulence flushing out of the night of a 
black background. In the latter picture there is on 
one side a priest, finely and soberly painted in his 
vestments of white and pale gold ; and, on the other, 
almost Blake-like figures asleep in attitudes of 
violent repose, or rising suddenly with hands held 
up against the dazzling light which breaks from 
the rising Saviour. But it is in the Martyrdom of 
S. Maurizio, ordered by Philip II. as an altar-piece 
for the Escurial, and refused by him when it had 
been painted, that we see the complete abandonment 
of warm for cold colouring, the first definite search 
for a wholly personal manner. Is it that he has 

57 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

not yet assimilated his new manner ? for the picture 
seems to me a sort of challenge to himself and to his 
critics, an experiment done too consciously to be 
quite sincere or quite successful. There is a wild 
kind of beauty, harshly and deliberately unsym- 
pathetic, in this turbulent angelic host, these figures 
of arbitrary height, placed strangely, their anatomy 
so carefully outlined under clinging draperies of 
crude blues and yellows, their skin turned livid 
under some ghastly supernatural light. In another 
picture painted for the Escurial, and now to be seen 
there, the Dream of Philip II., there is a hell which 
suggests the fierce material hells of Hieronymus 
van Bosch : a huge, fanged mouth wide open, the 
damned seen writhing in that red cavern, a lake of 
flame awaiting them beyond, while angels fly over- 
head, sainted persons in rich ecclesiastical vestments 
kneel below, and the king, dressed in black, kneels 
at the side. It is almost a vision of madness, and 
is as if the tormented brain of the fanatic who built 
those prison walls about himself, and shut himself 
living into a tomb-like cell, and dead into a not 
more tomb-like niche in a crypt, had wrought itself 
into the brain of the painter; who would indeed 
have found something not uncongenial to himself 
in this mountainous place of dust and grey granite, 
in which every line is rigid, every colour ashen, in 
a kind of stony immobility more terrible than any 
other of the images of death. 

It was only three years after the painting of the 
Martyrdom of S. Maurizio that Theotocopuli painted 
58 



A Study at Toledo. 

his masterpiece, the Burial of the Conde de OrgaZy 
which was ordered by the Archbishop of Toledo 
for the tomb, in the church of Santo Tome, of 
Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, Conde de Orgaz, who 
had died in the thirteenth century. The picture 
is still to be seen there, in its corner of the little 
white mosque-like church, where one comes upon 
it with a curious sensation of surprise, for it is at 
once as real and as ghostly as a dream, and it 
reminds one of nothing one has ever seen before. 
The picture, as it takes hold upon one, first of all, 
by a scheme of colour as startling as the harmonies 
of Wagner in music, seems to have been thought 
out by a brain for once wholly original, in forgetful- 
ness of all that had ever been done in painting. Is 
it that reality, and the embodied forms of the 
imagination, have been seen thus, at a fixed angle, 
instinctively and deliberately, for a picture, by an 
artist to whom all life is the escaping ghost of art ? 
Certainly its austerity, its spiritual realism, its 
originality of composition, so simple as to be 
startling, and of colour, the reticence of a passionate 
abnegation ; the tenderness of the outlines of the 
drooping dead body, in its rich armour; the mas- 
culine seriousness in all the faces, each of which is 
like one of the portraits in the Prado, and with all 
their subtlety, make the picture one of the master- 
pieces of painting. The upper part is a celestial 
company, arranged so as to drift like a canopy over 
the death-scene below ; and these angels are painted 
in swift outline, their blue and yellow draperies 

59 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

sweeping the vehement clouds. Below, where the 
warrior is dying, and his friends, with their dis- 
tinguished Castillian faces, their black clothes which 
sink into the shadow, the white rufFs about their 
thin faces and pointed beards standing out star- 
tlingly, crowd about him, we have the real world, in 
all the emphasis of its contrast to the spiritual 
world. Every face lives its own life, there on the 
canvas, assisting at this death as an actual spectator, 
thinking of this and of other things, not as a merely 
useful part of a composition. And the beauty of 
beautiful things is nowhere neglected : the fine 
armour, the golden and embroidered vestments of 
the bishop, the transparent white linen of the 
surplice worn by the tall man in the foreground, 
the gracious charm of the young priest who stoops 
over the dying man. The chief indication of what 
is to be the extravagant later manner comes out in 
the painting of the hands, with their sharp, pained 
gesticulation, to which nature is a little sacrificed. 
They must exclaim, in their gesture. 

Madness, it has commonly been supposed, and 
will still be told you by all the sacristans of Toledo ; 
a disease of the eye, as it is now thought ; mere 
insistent and defiant originality of search after what 
was new and powerfully expressive, as it may well 
have been ; something, certainly, before long set 
Theotocopuli chevauchant bors du possible, as Gautier 
puts it, in those amazing pictures by which he is 
chiefly known, the religious pictures in the Prado 
at Madrid, in the churches and the Hospital a fuera 
60 



A Study at Toledo. 



at Toledo, and in some galleries and private collec- 
tions outside Spain. In the immense retablo of 
Santa Clara, with its six large and four small panels, 
its gilded and painted statues, the sombre splendour 
of colour begins to darken, that it may be the more 
austere; the forms and faces, so vigorous in St. 
Jerome, so beautiful in St. Anne, begin to harden 
a little; but as yet leanness has not eaten up all, 
nor a devouring energy consumed away the incidents 
of the drama into a kind of spectral reflection of it. 
In the Dead Christ in the Arms of God the Father^ 
in the Prado, energy has grown eager and restless, 
as the divine persons are seen couched upon rolling 
white clouds, while a burst of golden sunlight 
blazes upon the great white wings of God. In the 
Ascension near it, where Christ floats upwards, 
carrying a white banner, while the soldiers fall about 
his feet, throwing their arms and swords wildly 
into the air, the lights seem to hurdle to and fro, 
catching the tips of noses, the points of knees, the 
hollows of breast-bones, in a waste of clouds and 
smoke. In the Baptism of Christ, the anatomies 
grow bonier than ever, more violently distorted by 
shadows, as a green and blue flood pours out angels 
like foam about the feet of God the Father. There 
is a Crucifixion as if seen by lightning-flashes, against 
a sky crackling with flames, while a poisonous 
green light flashes upon the tormented figures 
below. The hollow anatomy of Christ turns livid, 
the little angels who flutter about the cross are 
shadowed by the same spectral light, which sickens 

6i 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

their wings to green; another angel, at the foot of 
the cross, is coloured Hke the gold heart and green 
leaves of a crocus. This angel catches the blood 
dripping from the feet of Christ in a handkerchief, 
the Magdalen kneels beside him, holding up another 
handkerchief to catch the blood ; the other angels 
catch in their hands the blood dripping from the 
hands and side of Christ. In this picture all the 
extravagances of Spanish painting are outdone ; but 
without a trace of affectation. All these emblemati- 
cal details are like things seen, in a fury of vision, 
by one to whom sight is a disease of the imagination. 
In an Assumption of the Virgin in S. Vicente at 
Toledo, the whole landscape seems on fire, with 
flames of more than sunset, as an angel in a pale 
saffron robe bears up the feet of the Virgin, one 
gorgeous wing of ruddy brown spread out across 
the sky, while flame-winged angels surround her, 
one playing languidly upon a 'cello. And this 
surging tumult of colour, wild, sensitive, eloquent, 
seems to speak a new language, with vehement 
imperfection. Here, as in the Baptism in the 
Hospital a fuera, in which earnestness has become 
a kind of dementia, there is some of the beauty of 
an extravagant natural thing, of a stormy and in- 
coherent sunset. It is as if a painter had tried to 
embody such a sunset, creating fantastic figures to 
translate the suggestion of its outlines. 

And so Theotocopuli ends, in that exaggeration 
of himself which has overtaken so many of those 
artists who have cared more for energy than for 
62 



A Study at Toledo. 

beauty. His palette is still the limited, cold palette 
which we have seen in the hands of his portrait at 
Seville, but colour seems to chafe against restraint, 
and so leap more wildly within its limits. The 
influence of Tintoretto is after all unforgotten, 
though it is seen now in a kind of parody of itself. 
Lines lengthen and harden, as men seem to grow 
into trees, ridged and gnarled with strange accidents 
of growth. That spiritual body which he has 
sought for the reticent souls of his portraits becomes 
a stained, earthly thing which has known corruption. 
No longer, at all equably, master of himself or of 
his vision, he allows his skill of hand to become 
narrow, fanatical; and, in his last pictures, seems 
rather an angry prophet, denouncing humanity, 
than a painter, faithful to the beauty and expressive- 
ness of natural things. 

Spring, 1899. 



63 



The Poetry of Santa Teresa 
and San Juan de la Cruz.i 



"Here in Spain there are many poets," said a 
Capuchin monk to me, as, on Christmas Day, we 
stood together in the convent Hbrary, looking 
through the barred windows at the sunset which 
flamed over Seville. "The people are the poets. 
They love beautiful things, they are moved by 
them ; that word which you will hear constantly on 
their lips : Mira ! (' Look ! ') is itself significant. 
They would say it now if they were here, looking 
at the sunset, and they would point out to one another 
the colours, the shape of that tower silhouetted 
against the sky; they would be full of excited 
delight. Is there not something in that of the 
poetic attitude ? They have the feeling ; some- 
times they put it into words, and make those rhymes 
of which the greater part are lost, but some are at 
last written down, and you can read them in books." 
We had been discussing the Spanish mystics, 
San Juan de la Cruz, Juan de Avila, Fray Luis 
de Leon, Santa Teresa ; and I had just been turning 
over a facsimile of the original MS. of the Castillo 
Interior in Santa Teresa's bold, not very legible, 
handwriting, with its feminine blots here and there 
on the pages. I had been praising the great poetry 
of the two saints, and lamenting the rarity of really 
sincere, really personal, lyric poetry in Spanish ; 
and the monk's answer, as I thought over it on 
64 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

my way home that evening, seemed to me to point 
to the real truth of the matter. The Spanish 
temperament, as I have been able to see for myself 
during the three months I have already been in 
Spain, is essentially a poetical temperament. It is 
brooding, passionate, sensitive, at once voluptuous 
and solemn. Here is at least the material for 
poetry. But the moment a Spaniard begins to 
write, he has the choice of an extraordinary number 
of bad models, and, as in his architecture, as in so 
much of even his painting, he has been readier to 
adapt than to invent. Even Calderon, a great 
poet, is a perilous model ; and what of Gongora 
or Garbilaso, of Espronceda or Zorrilla ? On the 
one hand one finds extravagance and affectation ; 
on the other, haste, homeliness, and lack of care. 
In a sense, this poetry is often enough personal, 
but when it is personal in sentiment it is not personal 
in form, as in Espronceda, who indeed wrote the 
poetry he was living, but wrote it in the manner 
of Byron, The natural human voice, speaking 
straight out of the heart, pure lyric poetry, that is, 
cannot be found in Spanish literature outside the 
mystics, and a final choice may indeed be limited 
to Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz. These 
speak to God in Christ, the one as a mother to a 
child, the other as a wife to a husband. For each, 
the individual passion makes its own form, almost 
its own language, so that Crashaw's brilliant line 
of verse, "O 'tis not Spanish but 'tis Heaven she 
speaks ! " is really a subtle criticism as well. And, 

65 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

singularly unlike as is the childishly naked simplicity 
of Santa Teresa to the elaborate web of sweetness 
in which San Juan de la Cruz enfolds his rapture, 
each has the same supreme lyric quality : personal 
passion moulding individual form. 

And the poetry of the people, in its lesser, its 
less, final way, has this quality too ; so that in these 
two great Spanish poets we see the flower at last 
growing directly from the root. An unknown, 
perfectly spontaneous poet of the people makes up 
his little stanza of three or four hues because he has 
something to say which hurts him so much to keep 
in that he is obliged to say it. This of itself is not 
enough to make poetry, but it will make poetry if 
so intense a desire comes to life in a nature already 
poetically sensitive, in a nature such as this of the 
Spaniards. And the Spaniard, with that something 
abrupt, nervous, which there is in him, is singularly 
well able to condense emotion into brief form, 
such as he has created for these popular songs, 
which are briefer than those of most other nations, 
an impassioned statement, and no more. 

In the poetry of Santa Teresa we find almost 
the form of the popular song, and a choice of words 
which is for the most part no more than an in- 
stinctively fine selection of its actual language. San 
Juan de la Cruz, who lived habitually in an abstract 
world, out of which only a supreme emotion could 
draw him, has a more conscious choice of language, 
subtilising upon words that he may render all the 
subtlety of spiritual sensation ; and he uses largely 
66 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

a favourite literary form of that time, the five-Hne 
stanza in which, for example, the greater part of 
the poems of Fray Luis de Leon are written. But 
I am sure neither the one nor the other ever wrote 
a line with the intention of "making poetry," that 
intention which ruins Spanish verse to a deeper 
degree than the verse of most nations. They had 
something to say which could not be said in prose, 
a "lyrical cry" was in them which they could not 
repress ; and heaven worked together with earth 
that Spanish lyrical poetry might be born and die 
within the lifetime of two friends. 



IL 

The poetry of San Juan de la Cruz is meta- 
physical fire, a sort of white heat in which the 
abstract, the almost negative, becomes ecstatically 
realised by the senses. Here, in a translation as 
literal as I can make it, line for line, and with exactly 
the same arrangement and repetition of rhymes, 
is his most famous poem. En una Noche escura, a 
poem which is the keystone of his whole philosophy : 

Upon an obscure night, 

Fevered with love in love's anxiety, 
(Oh, hapless-happy plight!) 

I went, none seeing me, 
Forth from my house where all things quiet be. 

By night, secure from sight. 

And by the secret stair, disguisedly, 
(Oh, hapless-happy plight !) 

67 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

By night, and privily, 
Forth from my house where all things quiet be. 

Blest night of wandering. 

In secret, when by none might I be spied. 
Nor I see anything; 

Without a light or guide. 
Save that which in my heart burnt in my side. 

That light did lead me on. 

More surely than the shining of noontide. 
Where well I knew that one 

Did for my coming bide ; 
Where he abode might none but he abide. 

O night that didst lead thus, 

O night more lovely than the dawn of light, 
O night that broughtest us. 

Lover to lover's sight. 
Lover with loved in marriage of delight ! 

Upon my flowery breast. 

Wholly for him, and save himself for none, 
There did I give sweet rest 

To my beloved one ; 
The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon. 

When the first moving air 

Blew from the tower, and waved his locks aside, 
His hand, with gentle care, 

Did wound me in the side, 
And in my body all my senses died. 

All things I then forgot, 

My cheek on him who for my coming came ; 
All ceased, and I was not, 

Leaving my cares and shame 
Among the lilies, and forgetting them. 



68 



The greater part of the prose of San Juan de la 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

Cruz is built up out of this poem, or condensed 
into it : the Noche Escura del Alma is a Hne-by-Hne 
commentary upon it, and the Subida del Monte 
Carmelo, a still longer work, takes this poem for 
starting-point, and declares that the whole of its 
doctrine is to be found in these stanzas. The third 
and last of the three contemplative books, the 
Llama de Amor Fiva, is, in a similar way, a com- 
mentary on the poem which follows : 

O flame of living love, 
That dost eternally 
Pierce through my soul with so consuming heat. 
Since there's no help above, 
Make thou an end of me, 
And break the bond of this encounter sweet. 

O burn that burns to heal ! 
O more than pleasant wound ! 
And O soft hand, O touch most delicate, 
That dost new life reveal, 
That dost in grace abound, 
And, slaying, dost from death to life translate. 

O lamps of fire that shined 
With so intense a light. 
That those deep caverns where the senses live. 
Which were obscure and blind, 
Now with strange glories bright. 
Both heat and light to his beloved give. 

With how benign intent 

Rememberest thou my breast. 
Where thou alone abidest secretly, 
And in thy sweet ascent. 

With glory and good possessed, 
How delicately thou teachest love to me ! 

69 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Thus the whole Ohras Espirituales, 614 quarto 
pages in my copy of the original edition of 1618, 
are but a development of these two poems ; the 
poetry, as it should be, being at the root of the 
philosophy. 

In that strange, pedantic "figure" which stands 
at the beginning of the Subida del Monte Carmelo, 
the narrow way which leads to the mount is 
inscribed, "Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, 
nothing," and above, "and in the mount nothing"; 
but above that begin higher heights, inscribed 
with the names of the ultimate virtues, and above 
that the "divine silence" and the "divine wisdom," 
and the dwelling of the soul with God himself. 
With San Juan de la Cruz the obscure night is a 
way, the negation of all earthly things, of the earthly 
senses even, a means to the final union with God ; 
and it is in this union that darkness blossoms into 
the glittering delights of the poems. Pierce the 
dark night to its centre, and you will find light, 
for you will find God. "And so," he tells us, 
"in this soul, in which now no appetite abides, nor 
other imaginings, nor forms of other created things ; 
most secretly it abides in so much the more inner 
interior, and more straitly embraced, as it is itself 
the more pure, and single of all things but God." 
This rapture of negation becomes poetry, and 
poetry of the highest order, because it is part of a 
nature to which, if God is what Vaughan calls a 
"deep but dazzling darkness," he is also the 
supreme love, to be apprehended humanly by this 
70 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

quality, for which, and in which, he put on humanity. 
To San Juan de la Cruz the idea of God is an idea 
which can be apprehended mentally only by a series 
of negations ; the person of God can be appre- 
hended only emotionally, and best under the figure, 
which he accepts from the "Song of Solomon," 
of earthly marriage, the marriage of the soul and 
Christ. At once the door is opened in the seventh 
heaven of metaphysics for all the flowers in which 
the earth decks itself for lovers ; and this monk 
can give lessons to lovers. His great poem of forty 
stanzas, the Cancion entre el Alma y el Esposo, once 
or twice becoming almost ludicrous in the liveliness 
of its natural images, as when the Spouse drinks 
in the "interior bodega" of the Beloved, has a 
peculiar fragrance, as of very strong natural per- 
fumes, perfumes really made honestly out of flowers, 
though in the fieriest of alcohols. Here, and in 
the two mystical love-poems which I have translated, 
there is an abandonment to all the sensations of 
love, which seems to me to exceed, and on their 
own ground, in directness and intensity of spiritual 
and passionate longing, most of what has been 
written by the love-poets of all ages. These lines, 
so full of rich and strange beauty, ache with desire 
and with all the subtlety of desire. They analyse 
the sensations of the soul, as lovers do, that they 
may draw out their sweetness more luxuriously. 
In a merely human love they would be almost 
perverse, so learned are they in sensation. Sanctified 
to divine uses, they do but swing a more odorous 

71 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

incense, in censers of more elaborately beaten 
gold, in the service of a perpetual Mass to the 
Almighty, 

Of the Canciones there are but five ; and of these 
I have translated another, somewhat more abstract, 
less coloured, than the rest. 

Well do I know the spring that doth abound, 
Although it is the night. 

That everlasting spring, though hidden close, 
Well do I know whither and whence it flows. 
Although it is the night. 

Beginning know I not, for none there is, 
But know that all beginning comes from this. 
Although it is the night. 

I know there is not any fairer thing, 
And that the heavens and earth drink of this spring. 
Although it is the night. 

I know that end within It Is not found, 
Nor is there plummet that Its depths can sound. 
Although It is the night. 

Upon Its brightness doth no shadow come : 
Well know I that all light cometh therefrom. 
Although It Is the night. 

I know Its currents are so hard to bind, 
They water hell and heaven and human-kind. 
Although It Is the night. 

The current that from this deep spring doth flow. 
How mighty is its flowing, well I know, 
Although it is the night. 
72 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

This everlasting spring is occulted, 
To give us life, within this living bread, 
Although it is the night. 

Here it doth speak to man, and say to him : 
Drink of this living water, although dim. 
Although it is the night. 

This living spring, I have desired of old, 
Within this bread of life do I behold. 
Although it is the night. 

But, besides the Canciones, there are five Coplas 
and Glosas, still more abstract than this poem, but 
brimful of what I have called metaphysical fire, 
"toda ciencia transcendiendo" ; the ecstasy striving 
to find immediate, and no longer mediate, words 
for its revelation. Finally, there are ten Romances, 
of which all but the last are written in quatrains 
linked by a single rhyme, the accommodating 
Spanish rhyme in "ia." They are Biblical para- 
phrases and statements of theological doctrine, and 
reverence has not permitted them to find any fine, 
wild liberties for themselves, like the other, more 
instinctive, more emotionally inspired poems. They 
have the archaic formality of the fourteenth-century 
paintings of the Madonna, stifHy embroidered with 
gold, and waited on by formal angels. Some 
personal sentiment yet remains, but the personal 
form is gone, and they might seem to have been 
really written in an earlier century. 



73 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

III. 

With Santa Teresa all is changed. Her poems 
are improvisations, seem to have been written by 
accident, and certainly with no double or treble 
or hundredfold meanings concealed within them, 
Hke those of San Juan de la Cruz.^ They are im- 
petuous, incorrect, full of joyous life, almost of 
hilarity. Many of them are little songs with 
refrains ; some are composed on motives given 
by others, many for special occasions, such as a 
taking of the veil. One is a sort of paraphrase, 
or variant, of a poem of San Juan de la Cruz. It 
is interesting to compare the two, and to see how 
in the very first verse Santa Teresa brings in an 
idea entirely, and how characteristically ! her own : 
"This divine union of love with him I love makes 
God my captive, and sets free my heart; but 
causes such grief in me to see God my prisoner, 
that I die because I die not." She gives herself 
to God, as it were, with a great leap into his arms. 
She has no savorous reflections, no lingering over 
delights ; a practical swiftness, a woman's heart, 
and that joy which burns through all her work. 
"That love alone is that which gives value to all 
things," none knew so well as she, or realised so 
simply. "O pitying and loving Lord of my 
life ! Thou hast said : * Come unto me all ye 

^ He can be as minute in his explanations as to comment on the first 
three lines of the second stanza of llama de amor viva: The Burn is 
the Holy Spirit, the Hand is the Father, and the Touch is the Son. 

74 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

that thirst, and I will give you to drink.' How, 
then, can these but suffer great thirst that are now 
burning in living flames in the desire of these 
miserable things of the earth ? Needs must there 
be much water indeed if it is not to fail and be 
consumed. Now know I, Lord, of thy bounty 
that thou shalt give it : thyself sayest it, and thou 
canst not fail from thy words. Yet if they, used 
to living in this fire, and brought up in it, feel it 
not, nor have reason in their unreasonableness to 
see how great is their necessity, what remedy, O 
my God ? Thou hast come into the world to remedy 
even such great necessities ; begin. Lord : in these 
most difficult things dost thou most show thy 
pity. Behold, my God, that thine enemies make 
much headway : have pity on those that have no 
pity on themselves, now that their mischance so 
holds them that they desire not to come to thee : 
come thou to them, my God. I demand it in 
their name, and know that when they shall hear, 
and return to themselves, and begin to delight in 
thee, these now dead shall come to life. O life, 
that thou givest to all ! Deny me not this most 
sweet water that thou hast promised to those that 
seek it : I do seek it. Lord, and demand it, and 
come for it to thee : hide not thyself. Lord, from 
me, for thou knowest my need, and that it is the 
true medicine of the soul wounded by thee. O 
Lord, what manner of fires are there in this life ! 
Oh, how rightly do we live in fear ! Some there 
are that consume the soul, others that purify it, 

75 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

that it may live for ever, joying in thee. O Hving 
streams of the wounds of my God ! How do ye 
flow ever with great abundance for our maintenance, 
and how securely shall they go through the perils 
of this miserable life that are sustained by this 
divine beverage." "O true lover!" she cries, 
in her prose Exclamaciones, "with what pity, with 
what softness, with what delight, with what tender- 
ness, and with what great manifestations of love 
thou curest the wounds that with the arrows of that 
same love thou hast made!" And her verse, as 
in this poem, is an outpouring of love which speaks 
the simplest lovers' language, like a woman who 
cannot say "I love you!" too often. 

If, Lord, thy love for me is strong 

As this which binds me unto thee, 
What holds me from thee, Lord, so long, 

What holds thee, Lord, so long from me ? 

O soul, what then desirest thou ? 

— Lord, I would see thee, who thus choose thee. 
What fears can yet assail thee now ? 

— All that I fear is but to lose thee. 

Love's whole possession I entreat. 

Lord, make my soul thine own abode. 

And I will build a nest so sweet 
It may not be too poor for God. 

A soul in God hidden from sin, 

What more desires for thee remain, 

Save but to love, and love again. 
And, all on flame with love within. 

Love on, and turn to love again ? 
76 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

Another division of her poems consists of songs 
for Christmas, for the Circumcision, for the Virgin 
as mother ; and here, adapting to her use a form 
already existing, she practically invents a new form, 
in these little lyric dramas, dialogues of the shep- 
herds, in which the same shepherds appear, with 
their strange names. Bras or Brasillo, Menga, with 
Llorente and the invariable Gil. I have translated 
three of them, with all the archaisms, accidents of 
form, omission or reversal of rhymes, of the original, 
and, in the refrain of the second, an assonance 
exactly reproducing the original assonance. 



Let mine eyes see thee, 
Sweet Jesus of Nazareth ; 

Let mine eyes see thee. 
And then see death. 

Let them see that care 

Roses and jessamine ; 
Seeing thy face most fair. 

All blossoms are therein. 
Flower of seraphin, 

Sweet Jesus of Nazareth, 
Let mine eyes see thee, 

And then see death. 

Nothing I require 
Where my Jesus is ; 

Anguish all desire, 
Saving only this ; 

All my help is his, 
He only succoureth. 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Let mine eyes see thee, 
Sweet Jesus of Nazareth, 

Let mine eyes see thee, 
And then see death. 



II. 

Shepherd, shepherd, hark that calling ! 
Angels they are, and the day is dawning. 

What is this ding-dong, 

Or loud singing is it ? 
Come, Bras, now the day is here, 

The shepherdess we'll visit. 
Shepherd, shepherd, hark that calling ! 
Angels they are, and the day is dawning. 

Oh, is this the Alcade's daughter. 
Or some lady come from far ? 

She is the daughter of God the Father, 
And she shines like a star. 

Shepherd, shepherd, hark that calling ! 

Angels they are, and the day is dawning. 

III. 

To-day a shepherd and our kin, 
O Gil, to ransom us is sent. 
And he is God Omnipotent. 

For us hath he cast down the pride 
And prison walls of Satanas ; 
But he is of the kin of Bras, 
Of Menga, also of Llorent. 
O is not God Omnipotent ? 



78 



If he is God, how then is he 

Come hither, and here crucified ? 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

— With his dying sin also died, 
Enduring death the innocent. 
Gil, how is God Omnipotent ! 

Why, I have seen him born, pardie, 
And of a most sweet shepherdess. 

— If he is God, how can he be 

With such poor folk as these content ? 

— See'st not he is Omnipotent ? 

Give over idle parleying. 

And let us serve him, you and I, 
And since he came on earth to die, 
Let us die with him too, Llorent ; 
For he is God Omnipotent. 

These and other ecstasies over Christ in the 
cradle are the motherly instinct in her finding vicari- 
ous satisfaction ; and though we have here an 
instinct for w^hich genius finds expression in art, 
the whole force of the sentiment can be understood 
only by one who has seen a monk or nun exhibiting 
the conventual image of the infant Jesus to a sym- 
pathetic visitor. I have never seen a living child 
handled with more adoring tenderness than the 
monk of whom I have spoken handled the amazingly 
realistic "Bambino," who lay in a basket stuffed 
with straw, in his little frilled shirt and baby's cap 
with blue strings. Religion, any other controlHng 
force, can constrain, can turn into other directions, 
but cannot kill an instinct ; and the adoration of 
the divine child is the refuge of the childless, in 
convents and in the world. 

But Santa Teresa was not only a loving woman 

79 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and a loving mother, she was that great brain 
and great worker whom we know; and she wrote 
marching songs for the soldiers of Christ in their 
war against the world, and songs of triumph for 
their victories, and songs of warning for those who 
were lightly undertaking so great an enterprise. 
In all there is the same impetuous spirit, the same 
close hold on reality, and one to whom religion 
was not contemplation but action, or action even 
in contemplation. In reading the poems of San 
Juan de la Cruz, it is not easy to remember that he 
too was a monastic reformer : ^ it would be im- 
possible to read the poems of Santa Teresa without 
seeing the reformer, the woman of action, in the 
poet : 

Caminemos -para el cielo, 

Monjas de Carmelo! 

She sings, leading them, on that difficult way; 
and in that "Offering of Herself to God that she 
made," in the magnificent poem with the refrain 
"What would'st thou do with me.^"' we see the 
whole woman, "a woman for angelical height of 
speculation, for masculine courage of performance 
more than a woman," in Crashaw's famous words. 
Here, in prose, are three stanzas out of the twelve : 

What wouldst thou, then, good Lord, that so base a 
servant should do ? What service hast thou given to this 

^ He is described on the title-page of his works as "primer Descaho 
de la Reforma de N. Senora del Carmen, Coadjutor de la Bienaventurada 
Virgen S. Teresa de Jesus, Fundadora de la misma Reforma." 
80 



S. Teresa and S. Juan de la Cruz. 

sinful slave ? Behold me here, sweet Love ; sweet Love, 
behold me here ; what wouldst thou do with me ? 

See here my heart, I lay it in thy hand, my body, 
my life and soul, my bowels and my love ; sweet Spouse 
and redemption, since I offer myself to be thine, what 
wouldst thou do with me ? 

Give me death, give me life, give me health or sickness, 
honour or dishonour give me, give me war or perfect 
peace, weakness or strength to my life : to all I will 
answer yes ; what wouldst thou do with me ? 

This ardent, joyous simplicity, this impassioned 
devotion to v^hich every height or depth of sacrifice 
was an easy thing, this clear sight of God, not 
through the intellectual negations nor the symboHcal 
raptures of San Juan de la Cruz, but face to face, 
which give Santa Teresa her unique rank among 
the mystics, as the one who has seen spiritual things 
most directly, find here their simplest expression. 
Here, as in those poems of the people with which 
I began by comparing these poems, a ''flaming 
heart" burns outward to escape the intolerable 
pain of its reclusion. 

Winter, 1899. 



81 



Campoamor. 



Ramon de Campoamor y Campoosorio, who died 
at Madrid on the 12th of February 1901, was 
born at Navia, in the province of Asturias, on the 
24th of September 18 17. His career covers almost 
the whole century : he was the contemporary of 
Quintana, Espronceda, Zorrilla, yet absolutely un- 
touched by the influences which made of Quintana 
a lesser Cowper, of Espronceda a lesser Byron, and 
of Zorrilla a lesser Longfellow. Coming into a 
literature in which poetry is generally taken to be 
but another name for rhetoric, he followed, long 
before Verlaine, Verlaine's advice to ''take rhetoric 
and wring its neck." The poetry of words, of 
sounds, of abstractions, that poetry which is looked 
upon in Spain as the most really poetical kind of 
poetry, left him untouched ; he could but apply 
to it the Arab proverb : "I hear the tic-tac of the 
mill, but I see no flour." In his Poetica he declares 
boldly: "If we except the Romancero and the 
cantareSy Spain has almost no really national lyric 
poetry." "There are very well-built verses, that 
are lads of sound body, but without a soul. Such 
are those of Herrera and of almost all his imitators, 
the grandiloquent poets." In the simple masculine 
verse of Jorge Manrique (whose great poem, the 
Coplas por la muerte de su Padre, is known to most 
English readers in its admirable translation by 
Longfellow) he saw an incomparable model, whose 
grave and passionate simplicity might well have been 
the basis of a national style. " Poetry," he declares, 
82 



Campoamor. 

in what seemed to his critics an amusing paradox, 
"is the rhythmical representation of a thought 
through the medium of an image, expressed in a 
language which cannot be put in prose more natu- 
rally or with fewer words, . . . There is in poetry 
no immortal expression that can be said in prose 
with more simplicity or with more precision." 
Prose, indeed, seemed to him not really an art at 
all, and when Valera, a genuine artist in prose, 
defended his own ground by asserting that "meta- 
physics is the one useless science and poetry the 
one useless art," Campoamor replied in verse, 
defining prose as "la jerga animal del ser humano" 
("the jabber of the human animal"). "What 
are philosophical systems," he asks, "but poems 
without images ? " and, protesting against the 
theory of "art for art," and suggesting "art for 
ideas," or "transcendental" art, as a better definition 
of what was at least his own conception, he sums 
up with his customary neatness: "Metaphysics 
is the science of ideas, religion is the science of ideas 
converted into sentiments, and art the science of 
ideas converted into images. Metaphysics is the 
true, religion the good, and aesthetics the beautiful." 
By calling art "transcendental" he means, not 
that it should be in itself either philosophical or 
didactic, much less abstract, for "art is the enemy 
of abstractions . . . and whatever becomes im- 
personal evaporates," but that it should contain 
in itself, as its foundation, a "universal human 
truth," without which "it is no more than the 

83 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

letters of tattling women." "All lyric poetry 
should be a little drama." "In the drama of the 
Creation everything was written by God in sympa- 
thetic ink. We have but to apply the reagent 
and hold it to the light. The best artist is the best 
translator of the works of God." "It has been 
my constant endeavour," he tells us, "to approach 
art through ideas, and to express them in ordinary 
language, thus revolutionising the substance and 
form of poetry, the substance with the Doloras and 
the form with the Pequenos Poemas." Beginning 
at first with fables, he abandoned the form of the 
fable, because it seemed to him that the fable could 
only take root in countries in which the doctrine 
of the transmigration of souls was still believed. 
"The Dolor a, a drama taken direct from life, with- 
out the metaphors and symbols of indirect poetry, 
seemed to me a form more European, more natural, 
and more human than that of the oriental fable." 
But the Dolora was to retain thus much of the fable, 
that by means of its drama it was to "solve some 
universal problem," the solution growing out of 
the actual structure of the story. Thus, in poetry, 
subject is all-important, subject including "the 
argument and the action." "In every pebble of 
the brook there is part of an Escurial : the difficulty 
and the merit are in building it." "Novelty of 
subject, regularity of plan, the method with which 
that plan is carried out": these, together with 
the fundamental idea, which is to be of universal 
application, "transcendental," as he calls it, are 
84 



Camp 



oamor. 



the requisites of a work of art ; it is on these grounds 
that a work of art is to be judged. "Every work 
of art should be able to reply affirmatively to these 
four questions : 

The subject : can it be narrated ? 

The plan : can it be painted ? 

The design : has it a purpose ? 

The style : is it the man ? " 

Campoamor was no classical scholar, and it is 
but hesitatingly that he suggests, on the authority 
of "a French critic, who had it from Aristotle," 
that the theory of the Greeks in poetry was in many 
points similar to his. If we turn to Matthew 
Arnold's preface to his Poems, we shall find all 
that is fundamental in Campoamor's argument 
stated finally, and in the form of an appeal to 
classical models. "The radical difference between 
their poetical theory" (the Greeks', that is) "and 
ours consists, it appears to me, in this : that with 
them the poetical character of the action in itself, 
and the conduct of it, were the first consideration ; 
with us attention is fixed mainly on the value of the 
separate thoughts and images which occur in the 
treatment of an action." And, further on in that 
admirable preface, Matthew Arnold assures "the 
individual writer" that he "may certainly learn 
of the ancients, better than anywhere else, three 
things which it is vitally important for him to 
know : the all-importance of the choice of a subject, 
the necessity of accurate construction, and the 
subordinate character of expression." Is not this 

85 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

precisely the aim of Campoamor ? and is it not as 
a natural corollary to this severe theory of poetical 
construction that he tells us : ''Style is not a ques- 
tion of figures of speech, but of electric fluid"; 
"rhythm alone should separate the language of 
verse from that of prose" ; yet that language should 
always have an inner beauty, "the mysterious 
magic of music, so that it should say, not what the 
writer intends, but what the reader desires"? 
And so we come, not unnaturally, to his ideal in 
writing: "To write poems whose ideas and whose 
words had been, or seemed to have been, thought 
or written by every one." 

Upon these theories, it might well seem to us, 
a writer is left at all events free, and with a very 
reasonable kind of liberty, to make the most of him- 
self. Only, after all, the question remains : What 
was Campoamor's conception of subject and develop- 
ment ; how far was his precision a poetical precision ; 
did he, in harmonising the language of prose and 
of verse, raise the one or lower the other ? 

The twelve volumes of Campoamor's collected 
poems contain El Drama Universal, a sort of epic 
in eight "days" and forty-seven scenes, written 
in heroic quatrains, and worthy, a Spanish critic 
assures us, of "an Ariosto of the soul"; Colon, a 
narrative poem in sixteen cantos, written in ottava 
rima; El Licenciado Torralba, a legendary poem 
in eight cantos, written in iambic verse of varying 
length ; three series of Pequenos Poemas, each con- 
taining from ten to twelve narrative poems written 
86 



Campoamor. 

in a similar form of verse ; two series of Doloras, 
short lyrical poems, of which I have already quoted 
his own definition ; a volume of Humoradas, con- 
taining some hundreds of epigrams ; and two 
volumes of early work, brought together under 
the name of Poesias y Fdhulas. Besides these, he 
wrote some plays, the admirable volume called 
Poetica Polemicas Literdrias and a contribution to 
metaphysics called Lo Absoluto. Of his long poems, 
only one is what Rossetti called "amusing," only 
El Licenciado Torralha has that vital energy which 
keeps a poem alive. With this exception we 
need consider only the three collections in which 
a single thing, a consistent "criticism of life," is 
attempted under different, but closely allied forms : 
the Humoradas, which are epigrams ; the Doloras, 
which he defines as "dramatised Humoradas''' ; and 
the Pequenos Poemas, which he defines as "ampli- 
fied Doloras." 

Applied by a great poetical intellect, Campoa- 
mor's theories might have resulted in the most 
masterly of modern poems ; but his intellect was 
ingenious rather than imaginative ; his vivid human 
curiosity was concerned with life more after the 
manner of the novelist than of the poet ; his dramas 
are often anecdotes ; his insight is not so much 
wisdom as worldly wisdom. He "saw life steadily," 
but he saw it in little patches, commenting on facts 
with a smiling scepticism which has in it something 
of the positive spirit of the eighteenth century. 
Believing, as he tells us, that "what is most natural 

87 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

in the world is the supernatural," he was apt to 
see the spiritual side of things, as the Spanish 
painters have mostly seen it, in a palpable detach- 
ment from the soil, garlanded in clouds. Con- 
cerned all his life with the moods and casuistries 
of love, he writes of women, not of woman, and 
ends, after all, in a reservation of judgment. Poetry, 
to him, was a kind of psychology, and that is why 
every lyric shaped itself naturally into what he 
called a drama. His whole interest was in life 
and the problems of life, in people and their doings, 
and in the reasons for what they do. Others, he 
tells us, may admire poetry which is descriptive, 
the delineation of external things, or rhetorical, a 
sonorous meditation over abstract things ; all that 
he himself cares for are "those reverberations that 
light up the windings of the human heart and the 
horizons that lie on the other side of material life." 
Only, some imaginative energy being lacking, all this 
comes, for the most part, to be a kind of novelette 
in verse, in the Pequenos Poemas, a versified allegory 
in the Doloras, or an epigram in the Humoradas. 

Can verse in which there is no ecstasy be poetry ? 
There is no ecstasy in the verse of Campoamor; 
at the most a talking about ecstasy, as in some of 
the Pequenos Poemas, in which stories of passion 
are told with exquisite neatness, precision, sympa- 
thetic warmth ; but the passion never cries out, 
never finds its own voice. Once only in his work 
do I find something like that cry, and it is in El 
Licenciado Torralba, the story of a kind of Faust, 
88 



Campoamor. 

who, desiring love without unrest, makes for himself 
an artificial woman ("la mujer mas mujer de las 
mujeres")? Muliercula, to whom he gives 

El dnimo del hello paganismo, 

^ue, siendo menos que alma, es mas que vida. 

Torralba is arrested by the Inquisition as a necro- 
mancer and Muliercula is burnt at the stake. I 
have translated the description of her death : 

Midmost, as if the flame of the burning were 

A bed of love to her, 

Muliercula, with calm, unfrightened face, 

Not without beauty stood. 

And her meek attitude 

Had something of the tiger's natural grace. 

She suffers, yet, no less, 

Dying for him she loves, broods there, 

Within the burning air, 

Quiet as a bird within a wilderness. 

The wild beast's innocency all awake 

Enwraps her, and as she burns. 

The intermittent flaming of the stake 

To the poor fond foolish thing now turns 

Into a rapture, dying for his sake ; 

And then, because the instinct in her sees 

This only to be had, 

Nothingness and its peace. 

For her last, surest end, utterly glad, 

With absolute heart and whole. 

That body without a soul. 

As if the bright flame brings 

Roses to be its bed. 

Dies, and so enters, dead 

Into the august majesty of things ! 

There, in that fantastic conception of "la belleza 

89 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

natural perfecta" of woman, as the thinker, above 
all others, has desired to find her, I seem to discover 
the one passionate exception to Campoamor's 
never quite real men and women, the novelist's 
lay-figures of passion, about whom we are told so 
many interesting anecdotes. A witty story-teller, 
a sympathetic cynic, a transcendental positivist, 
he found the ways of the world the most amusing 
spectacle in nature, and for the most part his poems 
are little reflections of life seen as he saw it, with 
sharp, tolerant, worldly eyes. At his best, certainly 
most characteristic, when he is briefest, as in the 
Humoradas, he has returned, in these poHshed 
fragments, to the lapidary style of Latin poetry, 
reminding us at times of another Spaniard, Martial. 
Idea, clearness, symmetry, point, give to this kind 
of verse something of the hardness and glitter of a 
weapon, even when the intention is not satirical. 
With Campoamor the blade is tossed into the air 
and caught again, harmlessly, with all the address 
of an accomplished juggler. He plays with satire 
as he plays with sentiment, and, when he is most 
serious, will disguise the feeling with some ironical 
afterthought. Here are some of the HumoradaSy 
in Spanish and English. I have translated them, 
as will be seen, quite literally, and I have tried to 
choose them from as many moods as I could : 

^/ mover tu abanico con gracejo. 
^uitas el polvo al corazon mas viejo. 

You wave your fan with such a graceful art, 
You brush the dust off from the oldest heart. 
90 



Campoamor. 

Las ninas de las madres que ame tanto 
Me hesan ya como se besan a un santo. 
The children of the mothers I loved, ah see, 
They kiss me as though they kissed a saint in me ! 

Jamas mujer alguna 

Ha salido del todo de la cuna. 
No woman yet, since they were made all, 
Has ever got quite outside of the cradle. 

Prohibes tu amor con tus desdenes. 

Sin jrutos prohibidos no hay Edenes. 
Let your consent with your disdain be hidden : 
No Paradise whose fruit is not forbidden. 

No le gusta el placer sin violencia, 

Y por eso ya cree la desgraciada 

^ue ni es pasiSn, ni es nada, 

El amor que no turba la conciencia. 
She tastes not pleasure without strife, 
And therefore, hapless one, she feels 
That love's not good enough for life 
Which hales not conscience by the heels. 

Si es fdcil una hermosa, 

Voy y la dejo; 
Si es dificil la cosa, 

Tambien me alejo, 

Ninas, cuidad 
De amar siempre con fdcil 

Dificultad. 

If too easy she should be, 

I, beholding, quit her; 
If the thing's too hard for me. 

Trying proves too bitter. 

Girls, now see, 
Best it is to love with easy 

Difficulty. 

91 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Niegas que fuiste mi mejor amiga? 
Bien, hien; lo callare : nobleza obliga. 

That you were my best friend, do you deny ? 
Well, well ; noblesse oblige ; then so will I. 

Te he visto no s'e donde, ni se cuando. 
Ah! si; ya lo recuerdo, fue sonando. 

Have I not seen you ? Yes, but where and when ? 
Ah, I remember : I was dreaming then. 

Te es infiel! y la quieres? No me extrana; 
To adoro a la esperanza, aunque me engana 

She's faithless, and you love her ? As you will : 
Hope I adore, and hope is faithless still. 

Vas camhiando de amor todos los aiios, 
Mas no cambias jamas de desenganos. 

You change your love each year ; yet Love's commandment 
Is, that you never change your disenchantment. 

Por el la simetria es la helleza, 
Aunque corte a las cosas la cabeza. 

Beauty for him was symmetry, albeit 

He sometimes cut the heads off things, to see it. 

I will add three short pieces from the Doloras: 

Shamed though I be, and weep for shame, 'tis true, 
I loved not good what evil I love in you. 

They part ; years pass ; they do not see 

Each other : after six or seven : 
"Good Heaven ! and is it really he ?" 

"And is it really she ? good Heaven !" 
92 



Campoamor. 

THE SOUL FOR SALE 

One day to Satan, Julio, flushed with wine : 
"Wilt buy my soul ? " "Of little worth is it." 

"I do but ask one kiss, and it is thine." 

"Old sinner, hast thou parted with thy wit ?" 

"Wilt buy it ?" "No." "But wherefore ?" "It is mine." 

In such work as this there is much of what the 
Spaniards call "salt": it stings healthily, it is 
sane, temperate, above all, ingenious ; and the 
question as to whether or not it is poetry resolves 
itself into a question as to whether or not the verse 
of Martial, indeed Latin epigrammatic verse in 
general, is poetry. To the modern mind, brought 
up on romantic models, only Catullus is quite 
certainly or quite obviously a poet in his epigrams ; 
and his appeal to us is as personal as the appeal of 
Villon. He does not generalise, he does not smile 
while he stabs ; the passion of love or hate burns in 
him like a flame, setting the verse on fire. Martial 
writes for men of the world ; he writes in order to 
comment on things ; his form has the finish of a 
thing made to fulfil a purpose. Campoamor also 
writes out of a fruitful experience, not transfiguring 
life where he reflects it. If what he writes is not 
poetry, in our modern conception of the word, it 
has at least the beauty of adjustment to an end, of 
perfect fitness ; and it reflects a temperament, not 
a great poetical temperament, but one to which 
human affairs were infinitely interesting, and their 
expression in art the one business of life. 

1901. 

93 



A Spanish Poet : Niifiez 
de Arce. 

Poetry in Spain, when I wrote that article, was 
represented by two admired and popular poets, 
Ramon de Campoamor and Caspar Nunez de Arce. 
The popularity of Campoamor may be inferred 
from the fact that cheap editions of his works, and 
cheap selections from them, are to be found every- 
where in Spain ; but in the case of Nunez de Arce 
it is possible to speak with greater precision. In 
the preface to a poem published in 1866 he states 
that no Spanish work has been reprinted, in this 
century, so many times in so short a space of time, 
as the collection of his poems ; and that between 
1879 and 1885 a hundred and three editions, 
varying in number from 500 to 2000, have appeared 
in Spain, and nearly a hundred more in America. 
It may be interesting to consider for a moment the 
position of so popular a poet, the reason of his 
popularity, and the degree to which he deserves 
that popularity. 

Nuiiez de Arce is one of those many poets who 
expect to get credit for the excellent nature of their 
intentions, who do for the most part get credit for 
it, and who are genuinely surprised if it is pointed 
out that in poetry intention counts for nothing, 
apart from achievement. In the preface to El 
Vertigo he tells us that all the poems he has hitherto 
published are "tentatives in which I exercise my 
forces and assay my aptitude for the various kinds 
94 



Nunez de Arce. 

of contemporary poetry." Thus, La fjltima 
Lamentacion de Lord Byron is an attempt to obtain 
the epical tone in relation to a subject of our own 
times; the Idilio is an attempt to write domestic 
poetry; La Selva Oscura is an attempt to express 
thought under a symbolical form; La Vision de 
Fray Martin is an attempt to unite, "under a grave 
and severe form, the fantastic and the supernatural 
with the real and the transcendent." In the Gritos 
del Comhate he develops a whole theory of the 
mission of art, in order to justify a book of pohtical 
poems ; and in a lecture on contemporary poetry, 
reprinted in the same volume, apologises for occupy- 
ing himself with aesthetic questions at a time when 
grave social problems are troubling the minds of 
men. 

This preoccupation with politics, morals, and 
other problems more suited to prose than poetry, 
is characteristic of Spain, where it has always been 
so rare for a man of letters to be merely a man of 
letters, and where poets have so often been political 
leaders as well. Nunez de Arce was appointed 
governor of the province of Barcelona at the time of 
the revolution of 1868; he has held other pubhc 
posts at intervals during his Hfe; and it is evident 
that he looks at least as seriously upon what he 
conceives to have been his services to his country, 
as upon the poems which he has written with such 
well-defined intentions of "fulfilling those sacred 
duties, and carrying on that moralising mission," 
which he attributes to poetry. Nowhere, not even 

95 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

in England, are these "serious" views received 
with more favour than in Spain ; and a poet with a 
mission, and ^\^th distinctly explained ambitions, 
has an audience always awaiting him. 

Nor has he only an audience : the critics are on 
his side. Nuiiez de Arce is a typical instance of 
precisely the kind of writer who is certain of an 
indulgent treatment at the hands of the critics. 
There is so little to blame ; yes, so little either to 
blame or to praise. Here is a poet who takes 
himself seriously, who produces good, careful, 
thoughtful work, here impressive by its rhetoric, 
there by its simplicity, always refined, always 
earnest in its declamation, without vulgarity, or 
extravagance, or artificiality, so often the faults of 
Spanish poetry ; he can write vigorous narrative, 
of more than one kind, as in Raimundo Lulio and 
La Pesca; he can be romantic without being absurd, 
as in La Vision de Fray Martin; he can write verse 
which is technically correct, dignified, accom- 
plished : is there not some excuse for mistaking so 
apparently admirable a result for poetry ? And 
yet what avail all the negative virtues, and all the 
taste in the world, in the absence of the poetic 
impulse, poetic energy, the soul and body at once of 
poetry ? It is like discussing the degree to which 
a man who is certainly not alive is dead. Nunez 
de Arce has no intense inner life, crying out for 
expression ; his emotion is never personal, but 
generalised ; he has no vision, only an outlook. 
There is no singing note in his voice; every line is 
96 



Nunez de Arce. 

intellectually realised, line follows line as duly as 
in an argument ; but the exquisite shock or the 
more exquisite peace of poetry is in none of them. 
To be thoughtful is after all so slight a merit in a 
poet, unless the thought is of some rare or subtle 
kind, a thoughtfulness of the instincts rather than 
of the reason. Let the quality of his thought be 
tested by a glance at his epithets. In La Ultima 
Lamentacion de Lord Byron he invokes Greece : 
"Greece, immortal Greece! Loving mother of 
heroes and geniuses ! Calm fount of rich inspira- 
tion ! Fruitful spouse of Art ! Eternal light of 
the mind ! " Where, in these epithets, is that 
"continual slight novelty" which poetical style 
requires if it is to be poetry ? 

And even his patriotic feeling, strong and sincere 
as it is, is not of a fine poetical quality ; it is not to 
be compared with the patriotic feeling of Quintana, 
a poet whom he honours. Quintana, celebrating 
the defeat of Trafalgar, could say : "Para el pueblo 
magnanimo no hay suerte." But Nuiiez de Arce, 
narrowly political, can but see "sad Spain, our 
mother Spain, bleeding to death in the mud of the 
street," because a Senate is Republican or not 
Republican. He discusses, he does not sing; and 
for discussion poetry has no place. And his dis- 
cussion is a declamatory discussion, as in the poem 
called Paris, where a Bourgeois and a Demagogue 
of 1 87 1 toss to and fro the arguments for and against 
Anarchy, and are both solemnly rebuked by the poet 
at the end of the poem. His verse is full of an 

97 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

uninspired discontent, the discontent of an orator, 
not the passionate or ecstatic discontent of the poet : 

Hijo del siglo, in vano me resisie a su impiedad, 
he tells us, with a sort of melancholy pride in repre- 
senting, as it seems to him, so faithfully, a century 
whose materialising tendencies he so sincerely 
deplores. La Duda (Doubt) is one of his most 
popular poems, read with applause on the occasion 
of the "Juegos Florales" of the Catalan poets in 
1868. "In this age of sarcasm and doubt, there 
is but one muse," he tells us; "the blind, im- 
placable, brutal muse of analysis, that, armed with 
the arid scalpel, at every step precipitates us into the 
abyss, or brings us to the shores of annihilation." 
And it is always of this muse that he is uneasily 
conscious, unwilling to follow, and unable to turn 
aside. It has been part of his aim to write, not 
merely poetry, but modern poetry. But he comes 
to the task a moralist, a disbeliever in his own age, 
whose influence he feels as a weight rather than as 
an inspiration ; and he brings no new form, he adds 
no flexibility to an old form. Himself no new 
force, he has had the misfortune to be born in a 
country lacking in original forces. For a Spanish 
poet of to-day there is no environment, no helpful 
tradition. He looks back on a literature in which 
there is not a single great or even remarkable poet 
since Calderon. He has been brought up on 
Espronceda, Quintana, Zorrilla; which is as if an 
English poet of our days had no choice of models 
but a lesser Byron, a lesser Cowper, and a lesser 
98 



Niinez de Arce. 

Longfellow. He looks around him, and discovers 
no guiding light in other countries. In his Dis- 
course on Contemporary Poetry, delivered in 1887, 
Nufiez de Arce gives his opinion of English, French, 
Italian, and Russian poets, with a significant pref- 
erence for English poets, and among them for 
Tennyson, and a not less significant horror at what 
seems to him the shamelessness and impiety of 
poetry in France. But he is not content with even 
English poetry. "Swinburne," he tells us, "some- 
times sings as Nero and Caligula would have sung 
if they had been poets;" and he groups together 
Atalanta in Calydon and Anactoria as poems in which 
"impure passion. Pagan sensuality, erotic extrava- 
gance, acquire monstrous proportions, bellowing 
like wild beasts hungering for living flesh." Of 
Browning he has little to say, except "que no siento 
por el admiracion alguna." Richepin he looks 
upon as one of the typical poets of France, and he 
repeats the usual vague phrases about the Decadent 
School, without naming a single writer, and with 
a perfectly ingenuous lack of comprehension. The 
conclusion he brings back from his survey is that 
"humanity has lost its wings, and walks along 
unknown ways, not knowing whither it is going." 
And his final expression of hope in a regeneration 
of poetry, and of the world through poetry, is but a 
phrase of the rhetoric of despair. 

To all this there is but one answer, and the 
answer is briefly given in a single line of Sidney : 
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thine heart and write. 

99 



Moorish Secrets in Spain. 

The Moors, when they were driven out of Spain, 
left behind them, as if for some stealthy purpose, 
many of their secrets. Wherever you walk, in the 
south of Spain, you will come upon mosques, 
palaces, towers, gateways, which they built to per- 
petuate themselves in a strange land, and you will 
find in ruined fragments upon hills and windowless 
white houses under palm trees both actual remains 
and persistent followings of their cool, secluded 
way of building, meant for even fiercer skies and 
an even more reticent indoor life. Often, as in 
the Giralda by the side of the Gothic cathedral at 
Seville and in the mosque into which a Christian 
church has been built at Cordova, you can see 
at one glance the conflict or the contrast of two 
religions, of two theories of the universe. The 
mosque has no solemnity, no mystery ; it is a place 
of closed-in silence, shut in even from the sky, in 
a paradise of abstract art. I think of the plumage 
of tropical birds, the waving of palms, a darting 
fugue on the clavichord, to figure to myself the 
particular, after all unique, kind of fascination 
which the masterpieces of Arab architecture convey 
to one. Nothing so brilliant was ever imagined 
by a Gothic carver, so full of light, so airy, so ser- 
pentine in swiftness. A mosque, it seems to one 
as one walks among its pillars, is not a church at 
all, but rather a city, the arcades and alcoves of a 
city of fiery people, in whom strength runs all to 
dehcacy. The Arabs did not build high, they 

lOO 



Moorish Secrets in Spain. 

built wide ; and they sent their imagination out 
like arrows, hither and thither, in a flight at once 
random and mathematical. How singular a con- 
trast, is there not, with Gothic building, whose 
broad base is set for a steady heavenward ascension, 
yet whose caprices, in every entertainment to which 
line lends itself, are all so material and of the earth ! 
And so it seems to me that the architecture of the 
mosque is after all a more immaterial worship of 
the idea of God than any Christian architecture. 
Here there is invention of pattern, into which no 
natural object is ever allowed to intrude, the true 
art for art's sake, pure idea, mathematics, invention 
in the abstract ; for it is the work of an imagination 
intoxicated with itself, finding beginning and end 
in its own formally beautiful working out, without 
relation to nature or humanity. Christianity has 
never accepted this idea, indeed could not ; it has 
always distrusted pure beauty, when that beauty 
has not been visibly chained to a moral. Hence it 
has built its Bibles in stone, the Gothic cathedrals. 
But Islam, for which God has never put on humanity, 
worships an immaterial God in beautiful pattern, 
which it applies equally to its daily, its choicer 
daily uses. Is not this more truly the worship of 
the invisible and the unimaginable, of what is highest 
in the idea of God, than the Christian worship which 
we see under the same roof, with its divine images 
tortured with sorrow, ungracious with suffering, 
which do but drag down the mind from pure con- 
templation, from the eternal idea to its human 

lOI 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

manifestation in time ? That, at all events, is one 
of the secrets of the Moors. 

And they have left other secrets. You cannot 
walk through a little town in the south of Spain 
without hearing a strange sound, between crying 
and chanting, which wanders out to you from 
behind barred windows and from among the tin- 
kling bells of the mules. The Malaguena, they call 
this kind of singing ; but it has no more to do with 
Malaga than the mosque at Cordova has to do 
with the soil on which it stands. It is as Eastern 
as the music of tom-toms and gongs, and, like 
Eastern music, it is music before rhythm, music 
which comes down to us untouched by the invention 
of the modern scale, from an antiquity out of which 
plain-chant is a first step towards modern harmony. 
And this Moorish music is, like Moorish architec- 
ture, an arabesque. It avoids definite form just 
as the hues in stone avoid definite form, it has the 
same endlessness, motion without beginning or 
end, turning upon itself in a kind of infinitely varied 
monotony. The fioriture of the voice are like 
those coils which often spring from a central point 
of ornament, to twist outward, as in a particular 
piece of very delicate work in the first mihrab in 
the mosque at Cordova. In both, ensemble is 
everything, and everything is pattern. There is 
the same avoidance of emphasis, the same continu- 
ance on one level ; no special part starts out for 
separate notice, as in Gothic architecture or Western 
music. But the passion of this music is like no 

I02 



Moorish Secrets in Spain. 

other passion; fierce, immoderate, sustained, it 
is like the crying of a wild beast in suffering, and it 
thrills one precisely because it seems to be so far 
from humanity, so inexplicable, so deeply rooted 
in the animal of which we are but one species. 

Moorish music is inarticulate, and so it brings 
a wild relief which no articulate music could ever 
bring. It is the voice of uncivilised people who 
have the desires and sorrows common to every living 
being, and an unconsciousness of their meaning 
which is, after all, what we come back to after having 
searched through many meanings. It is sad, not 
because of personal sorrow, but because of all the 
sorrow there is, and always has been, in the world. 
The eyes of Spanish women have something of the 
same fierce melancholy, and with as little personal 
meaning. It is a music which has not yet lost 
companionship with the voice of the wind, the 
voice of the sea, the voices of the forest. It has 
never accepted order and become art ; it remains 
chaotic, elemental, a part of nature trying to speak. 

The monotony of this music (a few repeated 
notes only of the guitar accompanying it when 
there is any accompaniment to the voice) gives it 
much of its singular effect on the nerves. It speaks 
directly to the spine, sending an unaccountable 
shiver through one ; without racking the heart 
or the brain, after the manner of most pathos, even 
in sound. The words, it is true, are generally 
sombre, a desperate outcry; but the words of 
the three or four lines which go to make up a song 

103 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

are repeated over and over, in varying order, linger- 
ing out an incalculable time, so that the bare meaning 
is changed into something of a pattern, like the 
outlines of a flower in Moorish architecture. Yes, 
abstract as their architecture, their music has none 
of the direct, superficially human appeal which 
pathetic Western music has. These songs are 
largely improvisations, and a singer will weave 
almost any web of music about almost any fragment 
of verse : whether the words wail because Spain 
has lost Cuba or because a lover has lost his beloved, 
it is all the same ; it all comes from the same deep, 
fiery place in the soil. 

Singing and dancing in Spain are as the right 
hand and the left ; and the same airs, throbbing 
on a guitar, guide the most characteristic kind of 
dancing. Here the meaning is more explicit ; 
like the pantomime of all Eastern dancing, like the 
shapeless jog-trot of the Soudanese, which you 
can see at Earl's Court, like the undisguised mimicry 
of the women in the Rue du Caire at the last Paris 
Exhibition, it is wholly sexual. But in the dancing, 
inherited from the Moors, which the gipsies have 
perfected in Spain, there is far more subtlety, 
delicacy, and real art than in the franker posturing 
of Egypt and Arabia. It is the most elaborate 
dancing in the world, and, like the music, it has an 
abstract quality which saves it from ever, for a 
moment, becoming vulgar. As I have watched 
a Gitana dancing in Seville, I have thought of the 
sacred dances which in most religions have given 
104 



Moorish Secrets in Spain. 

a perfectly solemn and collected symbolism to the 
creative forces of the world. Hieratic, not per- 
verse, centred upon the central fact of existence ; 
moving gravely, without frivolity, in a sense without 
passion, so deeply is the passion rooted in the 
nature of things ; the dance coils round upon itself 
as the trails of music and the trails in stone coil 
round upon themselves. It is another secret of 
the Moors, and must remain as mysterious to us 
as those other secrets, until we have come a little 
closer than we have yet come to the immaterial 
wisdom of the East. 

Autumn, 1899. 



105 



Valencia. 

Past the deserts, orange groves, and watered 
gardens, winding up and down between low jagged 
hills and the sea, which, against the red soil about 
Cabaiial and the harbour, is often blood-red, sud- 
denly, turning inland, we are in Valencia. It was 
dark when I reached it, and I have never seen, 
except point by point in its midst, this city of tall 
towers and blue domes. I have followed all its 
windings, and on every side it dwindles out to 
dusty and cheerless boulevards, a half-dry river- 
bed, gardens with palms and all manner of slim, 
feathery trees, thirsty for lack of rain, and grey 
with dust. It is a maze of tall and narrow streets, 
in which houses of irregular height and size, and 
colour and style, follow one another with a uniform 
profusion of balconies, all with their shutters or 
their persianas; here and there four or five streets 
debouch into an oddly shaped square, for the most 
part a mere space between street and street, and 
for the most part with a church at one of its corners. 
There are whole streets of shops, every shop with 
its little oval signboard, painted with the image 
of a saint ; every shop open to the street, and hung 
outside with sashes, and plaids, and lengths of 
cloth and velvet, and shawls, and blankets, and 
every kind of long, bright stuff. And, stagnant 
amidst the constant flowing of busy life, to and fro 
in these vivid, narrow streets, a beggar stands at 
every crossing; men with a horrible absence of 
hands, men without legs, men doubled up, and 
1 06 



Val 



encia. 



twisted into strange shapes, hopping Hke frogs, 
blind men, men sitting against the wall with cloaks 
drawn over their faces, old men tottering with age, 
women carrying sick children, or with children 
running beside them with little tin plates in their 
hands. 

Valencia is both old and new, and much in it 
seems to be at once old and new. The people 
are busy, thriving, but they work with their hands, 
not with machinery, and they work almost in the 
open air, in shops laid open like Eastern bazaars, 
in great doorways, where whole families assemble 
with their chairs, or sitting on balconies, in the 
Spanish fashion, with their backs to the street. 
The women pass, bare-headed, in their bright 
clothes, on their tiny feet, carrying pitchers to the 
fountain, and pitchers of beautiful ancient form, 
like two-handed amphorae. They pass, dressed in 
black, with their black mantillas and their fans, on 
their way to the churches, to which they are always 
going, and from which they are always coming. 
And in the men's handkerchiefs, twisted into a 
turban, with a hanging tail ; in many of the faces, 
in which brown blackens to so dark a shade ; in 
fingers and finger-nails, stained like a negro's, I see 
the Moors, still unconquered in Spain. 

And the colour ! I have never seen so much 
colour in any streets before, except indeed in the 
streets of Moscow, where it hurts. Here it is 
bright, moving, not insistent, and clothing gay life. 
I like to walk in the market-place on a sunny 

107 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

morning, among those white stalls, set up with 
coverings like sails, at which brown women sit in 
their comfortable chairs, laughing, calling to one 
another, fanning the fruit to keep off the cloud of 
flies and mosquitos. There is a ceaseless noise, 
passing, sound of voices ; bright dresses, shawls, 
aprons throng the pavement and the roadway; 
every one, as people do in Spain, is hurrying leisurely ; 
they are at once serious and good-humoured, as 
Spanish people are. And this coloured crowd is 
moving under the shadow of the Lonja, with its 
delicate fifteenth-century Gothic (still, as naturally 
as ever, the Exchange), and before the barbaric 
rococo of the church of Los Santos Juanes, in the 
one spacious square of Valencia, where, in the days 
of the Cid, tournaments were held, and men have 
been burned alive. 

This living on of the Middle Ages, in a busy 
town, into the present, came home to me with singu- 
lar force one Thursday morning as I went to the 
Cathedral Square to see the Tribunal of the Waters. 
Outside the Apostles' Door an iron railing had been 
set up on the broad pavement, and, within the 
railing, an old-fashioned sofa, semicircular in form, 
had been placed ; and at half-past eleven six old 
men, peasants, took their seats, bare-headed, in 
their peasants' blouses. Then two peasants came 
forward, entered the enclosure, and each stated 
his case briefly. The case was heard, discussed, 
and decided in five minutes. The six old men 
sat there leaning forward on their sticks, listening 
io8 



Valencia. 

attentively, for the most part saying nothing, 
tacitly accepting the judgment of their president, 
a keen-faced, unhesitating man, who sat with his 
head bent, and his eyes raised scrutinisingly, never 
moving from the face of the man before him. His 
decision has the force of law, and this tribunal, 
which, since the time of the Moors, has sat here 
every Thursday at half-past eleven to decide all 
questions relating to the watering of the lands, is 
a remnant of medizeval democracy, peasants judging 
peasants, which is not the least surprising of popular 
survivals. 

Another morning I seemed to myself more than 
ever in the Middle Ages, as I attended a Latin 
discussion in the cathedral, when D. Tariny Rafael 
Torres propounded the thesis that three things are 
needed for a perfect repentance : oris confessio, 
cordis contritio, atque operis satisfactio, and the Sres. 
Martinez and Fuset disputed the thesis. Against 
the entrance to the choir, over which hung a lighted 
lamp, a carpet had been laid, on which was placed 
a row of crimson-covered arm-chairs and a table 
covered with crimson cloth. Opposite, imme- 
diately against the door of the principal entrance, 
a movable pulpit had been set up, also hung with 
crimson, and standing on a high wooden frame, to 
which steps led at the back. On both sides were 
benches for the audience. Six church dignitaries, 
in their crimson and ermine robes, sat on the seats 
at the table, one or two others at the side, and the 
disputants on an ancient leather-covered settle on 

109 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

the right of the pulpit. The orator was led in with 
ceremony. He spoke, seated, for exactly an hour. 
After he had spoken, the younger of the two dis- 
putants, a man with the face of an intellectual 
fighter, rose with his first contra. He spoke rapidly, 
almost disdainfully, with a suppressed smile, as 
he proposed his difficult questions. I left after 
nearly two hours, while the older of the two 
disputants was proposing his objections. I found 
Latin surprisingly like Spanish, when pronounced 
with a Spanish accent, the Spanish lisp and gutturals : 
nunquam, for instance, sounding like the Spanish 
nunca, etiam like ethiam. And the audience, that, 
too, reminded me of what those audiences must 
have been that flocked to hear the Schoolmen. On 
and around the benches, in a dense mass on each 
side, were priests and students, a certain number 
of men who had probably once been students, and 
then boys, old men, women, beggars — people who 
certainly could not understand a word that was 
said, but gazing, and apparently listening, with 
rapt attention, as if to a strange religious service, 
quite out of the usual course, which it was partly 
curious and partly pious to attend. One old 
woman, not far from me, knelt. 

The churches of Valencia, so numerous, and 
filled during all the hours of service with so constant 
a devotion, are of but moderate value architecturally, 
apart from the curiosity of their structure, in such 
churches as San Andres and San Nicolas, where 
the original form of the mosques, out of which 
no 



Val 



encia. 



they have been built, still persists, almost unaltered. 
Many churches, once Gothic, have been spoiled 
out of recognition ; plaster and whitewash and gold 
paint have been at work on almost every interior; 
and the few good pictures which might be seen, 
the Ribaltas, Juanes, an interesting Goya, are put 
into dark corners, where it is impossible to see 
them properly. The Cathedral itself, built on 
the site of a mosque, and seen at its best in the bell- 
tower and cimborio, which rise very effectively 
against different aspects of the sky, has suffered 
restoration, and its principal entrance is now tawdry 
with meaningless ornament. The one satisfying 
piece of Gothic here is in none of the churches, but 
in the Lonja, with its pillars spiring to the roof 
and branching out into stone palm trees, with a 
really broad effect of delicacy. Renaissance archi- 
tecture is but just seen in the audiencia; and, in 
the palace on which I am looking out as I write, 
a terrible example of eighteenth-century barocco, 
a very masterpiece of the art of heaping up the 
unnecessary. The river of Valencia, the Turia, 
which, strictly speaking, scarcely exists, is to me 
almost the most fascinating thing here, framing 
in the picture I make for myself of this intricate 
place, with an effect that pleases me. The river 
banks, with their stone quays, are wide enough 
for the Seine, and the Turia is a thread of water 
lost in the sand. The dry river-bed is a mass of 
brown sand, like the seashore; trees grow on each 
side and grass about the trees ; the horse-market 

III 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

is held here in the morning, carts pass to and fro, 
cattle lie there on heaped straw, soldiers gallop 
over it on their horses, black sheep Hvander along 
it in a fantastic dark crowd, the dust rising whitely 
from under their little hoofs. And there are 
moments when the thin stream, flowing in and out 
among the sand, touches all these colours with an 
exquisite light, drawing into itself the green of 
the trees, and shining daintily amidst the dust. 
In such moments one seems to see Africa, the desert 
and the oasis. 

Under a stormy sky the river-bed has a wild 
and savage aspect, its brown sand reddening under 
the dark clouds, droves of black cattle roaming 
over it, the wind stirring in the leaves of the trees ; 
and one night I saw across it one of the most original 
sunsets I had ever seen ; a sunset in brown. Stand- 
ing on the bridge next beyond the Moorish " Bridge 
of the Law" and looking towards the Gate of 
Serranos, with its fourteenth-century battlements, 
every line distinct against a rim of pale green sky, 
I saw the clouds heaped above them in great loose 
masses of brown, nothing but shades of brown, 
and every shade of brown. It was as if the light 
smouldered, as if an inner flame scorched the white 
clouds, as flame scorches paper, until it shrivels 
into an angry, crackling brown. Under these 
loose masses of brown cloud the battlemented gate, 
the tall houses, a square and narrow tower which 
rose beyond them, darkened to exactly the same 
colour in shadow; and all but the upper part 

112 



Valencia. 

vanished away into complete darkness, which 
extended outwards over the trees on the quay and 
over a part of the dry river-bed, coming suddenly 
to an end just before the water began. The thin 
stream was coloured a deep purple, where the 
reflection of the clouds fell right upon it; and 
higher up, where a foot-bridge crossed the river, 
reversed shadows walked in greenish water, step 
for step with the passers on the bridge. It was 
long before the light faded out of the clouds, which 
sank to a paler and paler yellow; and I stood there 
thrilled with admiration of those violent and daring 
harmonies, which seemed to carry Nature beyond 
her usual scheme of colour, in what I could not 
help almost hearing as the surge of a Wagnerian 
orchestra. 

Winter y 1898. 



"3 



Tarragona. 



Seen from the sea, Tarragona is a cluster of grey 
houses, full of windows, on a hill rising steeply 
from the shore ; and the grey houses climb to a 
yellow point, the Cathedral. At the foot of the hill 
the black line of railway crosses a strip of ruinous 
land, from which the abrupt rock goes up to the 
Paseo de Santa Clara; and, leaning there over the 
railings, one looks down on that strip of ruinous land, 
whitened harshly by the great open square of the 
prison, whenever one looks seawards. 

And, indeed, all Tarragona is expressed in those 
two words, ruins and the sea. Whichever way one 
follows it, it ends in half-hewn rock, and in a new 
aspect of the sea, and it is built out of the ruins of a 
Roman colony. The Roman walls themselves, of 
which such considerable fragments remain, rise on 
the foundations of a Cyclopean wall, built of vast 
unhewn masses of stone; the Cathedral stands on 
the site of a Moorish mosque ; a public square, lined 
with houses, the Plaza de Fuente, still keeps the 
form of the Roman circus. Most of the houses 
in the old town are made out of the ruins of Roman 
houses, modern windows break out in solid Roman 
walls, left to end where ruin left them to end ; 
there are Roman fountains in the squares, Roman 
tombstones are built into the walls of the Arch- 
bishop's palace, fragments of triumphal arches are 
set into the walls about Roman gateways ; the 
"Tower of Charles V." comes up from the tiled 
roof of the Arsenal, and "Pilate's Tower," once 
114 



T 



arragfona. 



part of the Palace of Augustus, is a prison. And 
out of all these ruins of great things there has come, 
for the most part, only something itself dilapidated, 
to which the ruins lend no splendour. They exist, 
but half themselves, as if unwillingly made a part 
of the stagnant life about them, unwillingly closing 
in the coloured movement of markets, the rapid, 
short steps of Spanish soldiers. They have seen 
narrow streets come up in their midst, twisting be- 
tween them, winding up and down steps, and around 
corners, and jutting out into irregular squares and 
odd triangles ; doorways, windows, busy iron bal- 
conies, flat roofs, the whole idly active Spanish life 
open to the street, or disappearing behind green 
persianas; and they see the Spaniards still quarrying 
about them, restless, and leaving their impoverished, 
fragmentary city still unfinished. 

Yet Tarragona has its one marvel, the Cathedral, 
as the Cathedral has itself its marvel, the cloisters. 
Its facade, coloured the brown of the earth, and 
warmed with a tinge of almost ruddy gold, fills the 
whole space of sky at the end of the steep street by 
which one approaches it, whose narrow lines indeed 
cut into the great rose-window, and the arched 
Gothic portal, in which the Virgin and Child stand 
in the midst of prophets and apostles, carved simply 
and devoutly by the thirteenth-century sculptor, 
who has set over them a Last Judgment in relief, 
crowded with small, indistinguishable dead, while 
the great saints — each saint distinct with his written 
history beside him — rise visibly from their coffins, 

115 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and two flying angels blow long trumpets above 
their heads. Walking round it, by ways which 
lose and find it again, we see the long, irregular, 
late Romanesque structure, like house added to 
house, with its low octagonal turret, exactly the 
deep, rich colour of plum pudding. Inside, the 
church, with less of that properly Spanish mystery 
which we find in the Cathedral at Barcelona, for 
example, has an ample dignity, and at night, before 
the altar candles are lit, becomes splendid in shadow. 
In its detail, in the gradual accumulation of structure 
and ornament, the statues of the retablo, the windows, 
doorways, columns, it is in itself an almost complete 
historical museum of Spanish art in stone. But it 
is, after all, in the cloisters that one cares chiefly to 
linger. To walk there, looking between the slim 
white columns, with their history of the Bible or 
of the world carved minutely and with mediaeval 
humour on the capitals ; looking past them into 
that inner court where a garden of trees and shrubs 
blossoms with many greens — the green of palm, of 
cypress, of oleander; in that coolness under the 
sunshine visible upon the fohage, is to surrender 
oneself to an enchanted peace. Here Tarragona at 
least still sleeps perfectly, in that permanent dream 
of the Middle Ages. 

Ruins and the sea, I have said, make up most of 
Tarragona ; and the sea here has some particular 
charm of its own, new to me, after all I have seen 
of the sea. A wide rambla, planted with trees, 
where, in the afternoon, every one walks, leads to 
ii6 



Tarragona. 

that iron railing at the cliff's edge from which, but 
for the pedestal of a modern statue, one could look 
right through the new town to the open country 
and the vine-covered hills of the Priorato. To the 
right is the harbour, with its long curving mole; 
to the left, a little neck of land runs out into the sea, 
making a kind of tiny bay; in front, the unlimited 
sea. At night the gaslight mole becomes a horseshoe 
with golden nails, the little neck of land might be 
the first glimpse of a desert island. Something in 
the point from which one looks down on it, the sense 
of being almost theatrically perched on the edge of 
a great balcony, helps, no doubt, to make one look 
on this view of the sea as a great spectacle, arranged 
against a magnificent moving background of clouds. 
Certainly I never saw the clouds dispose themselves 
with so conscious an air of being scenery, a back- 
ground, as about that vast plain of blue sea, pillaring 
a kind of fleecy dome over it. And the strip of 
black ruinous land made its own line of footlights, 
dark-coloured for contrast with that watery, and 
variable, and gentle brilliance. 

It is certain that the expressive quality of Tarra- 
gona comes out, not only in the union, but in the 
emphatic contrast, of sea and ruins. And that 
particular harsh spot on the shore, the great prison, 
"El Milagro," has its own singular value in the 
composition. One looks down, from those railings, 
on the whole inner court, open to the sky, and painted 
sky-blue, where a line of prisoners sits in the sun, 
wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, rope-making, 

117 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and the others stroll about, drink out of earthen 
pitchers, or sit on great stones, all over the court, 
or with their backs against the doors of the prison- 
chapel. They have hung up their coats on nails 
in the wall, and they lounge there in their shirt- 
sleeves, and white sandal-shoes, exactly as they 
would lounge in their own doorways. Outside the 
high white walls, soldiers, with fixed bayonets, 
stand on guard ; and at night, after the prison is 
silent behind its grated windows, one hears their 
long cry of Alerta echoing other voices from up the 
hill. And that centre of lives that have come to 
grief, all that pent-up violence, is set there between 
the city and the sea, for idle people to look down 
upon all day ; and all day long, beggars, or children, 
or casual passers, stand leaning over those railings, 
staring down into the prison-yard. As many people, 
I think, look at the prison as at the sea ; some of 
them cannot see the sea for the prison, and their 
eyes stop there on the way. And for every one 
who looks at the sea there is the prison thrusting 
itself between one's sight and the sea, more desolate 
than any ruin, a wicked spot which one cannot wipe 
off from the earth. 

Winter, 1898. 



118 



Cordova. 

Seen from the further end of the Moorish bridge 
by the Calahorra, where the road starts to Seville, 
Cordova is a long brown line between the red river 
and the purple hills, an irregular, ruinous line, 
following the windings of the river, and rising to 
the yellow battlements and great middle bulk of the 
cathedral. It goes up sheer from the river-side, 
above a broken wall, and in a huddle of mean 
houses, with so lamentably picturesque an air that 
no one would expect to find, inside that rough 
exterior, such neat, clean, shining streets, kept, even 
in the poorest quarters, with so admirable a care, 
and so bright with flowers and foliage, in patios and 
on upper balconies. From the bridge one sees the 
Moorish mills, rising yellow out of the yellow water, 
and, all day long, there is a slow procession along it 
of mules and donkeys, with their red saddles, 
carrying their burdens, and sometimes men heavily 
draped in great blanket-cloaks. Cross the city, and 
come out on the Paseo de la Victoria, open to the 
Sierra Morena, and you are in an immense village- 
green with red and white houses on one side, and 
black wooded hills on every other side; the trees, 
when I saw it for the first time at the beginning of 
winter, already shivering, and the watchers sitting 
on their chairs with their cloaks across their faces. 

All Cordova seems to exist for its one treasure, 
the mosque, and to exist for it in a kind of remem- 
brance ; it is white, sad, delicately romantic, set in 
the midst of a strange, luxuriant country, under the 

119 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

hills, and beside the broad Guadalquivir, which, 
seen at sunset from the Ribera, flows with so fantastic 
a violence down its shallow weirs, between the mills 
and beneath the arches of the Moors. The streets 
are narrow and roughly paved, and they turn on 
themselves like a maze, around blank walls, past 
houses with barred windows and open doors, 
through which one sees a flowery patio, and by little 
irregular squares, in which the grass is sometimes 
growing between the stones, and outside the doors 
of great shapeless churches, mounting and descend- 
ing steeply, from the river-bank to the lanes and 
meadows beyond the city walls. Turn and turn 
long enough through the white solitude of these 
narrow streets, and you come on the dim arcades 
and tall houses of the market-place, and on alleys 
of shops and bazaars, bright with coloured things, 
crimson umbrellas, such as every one carries here, 
cloaks lined with crimson velvet, soft brown leather, 
shining silver-work. The market is like a fair; 
worthless, picturesque lumber is heaped all over 
the ground, and upon stalls, and in dark shops like 
caves : steel and iron and leather goods, vivid 
crockery-ware, roughly burnt into queer, startling 
patterns, old clothes, cheap bright handkerchiefs 
and scarves. Passing out through the market- 
place, one comes upon sleepier streets, dwindling 
into the suburbs ; grass grows down the whole 
length of the street, and the men and women sit in 
the middle of the road in their chairs, the children, 
more solemnly, in their little chairs. Vehicles pass 

120 



Cordova. 

seldom, and only through certain streets, where a 
board tells them it is possible to pass ; but mules 
and donkeys are always to be seen, in long tinkling 
lines, nodding their wise little heads, as they go on 
their own way by themselves. At night Cordova 
sleeps early ; a few central streets are still busy 
with people, but the rest are all deserted, the houses 
look empty, there is an almost oppressive silence. 
Only, here and there, as one passes heedlessly along 
a quiet street, one comes suddenly upon a cloaked 
figure, with a broad-brimmed hat, leaning against 
the bars of a window, and one may catch, through 
the bars, a glimpse of a vivid face, dark hair, and a 
rose (an artificial rose) in the hair. Not in any part 
of Spain have I seen the traditional Spanish love- 
making, the cloak and hat at the barred window, 
so frankly and so delightfully on view. It brings a 
touch of genuine romance, which it is almost difficult 
for those who know comic opera better than the 
countries in which life is still, in its way, a serious 
travesty, to take quite seriously. Lovers' faces, on 
each side of the bars of a window, at night, in a 
narrow street of white houses : that, after all, and 
not even the miraculous mosque, may perhaps be 
the most vivid recollection that one brings away 
with one from Cordova. 

Winter, 1898. 



121 



Montserrat. 

Like one not yet awakened from a dream I seemed 
to myself while I was still in Montserrat ; and now, 
having left it, I seem to have awakened from the 
dream. One of those few exquisite, impossible 
places which exist, properly, only in our recollection 
of them, Montserrat is still that place of refuge 
which our dreams are; and is it not itself a dream 
of the Middle Ages, Monsalvat, the castle of the 
Holy Graal, which men have believed to be not in 
the world, and to contain something not of the 
world, seeing it poised so near heaven, among so 
nearly inaccessible rocks, in the lonely hollow of a 
great plain ? Solidly based on the fifteen miles 
which encircle it, the mountain goes up suddenly, 
in terrace after terrace, with a sort of ardent vigour, 
close-pressed columns of rock springing step by 
step higher into the air, pausing for a moment 
where the Monastery stands on its narrow ledge, 
2900 feet high, and then going on for another 
thousand feet, ending in great naked fingers of rock 
which point to the sky. The tall, bare buildings 
of the monastery are built of yellow stone, and, seen 
from a distance, seem to become almost a part of 
the mountain itself, in which the grey stone is ruddy- 
hearted, like the colour of the soil at its feet. And 
as the monastery seems to become almost a part of 
the mountain, so the rock itself takes the aspect of 
a castle, a palace; especially at night, when one 
seems to look up at actual towers overtopping the 
tall buildings. And from this narrow ledge between 
122 



Montserrat. 

heaven and earth, a mere foothold on a great rock, 
one looks up only at sheer peaks, and down only 
into veiled chasms, or over mountainous walls to 
a great plain, ridged as if the naked ribs of the earth 
were laid bare, the red and grey soil spotted dark 
with trees, here and there whitened with houses, 
furrowed by a yellow river, the white line of roads 
barely visible, man's presence only marked by here 
and there a little travelling smoke, disappearing 
into the earth, insect-like, or, insect-like, crawling 
black on its surface. 

With all its vastness, abruptness, and fantastic 
energy, Montserrat is never savage ; it is always 
forming naturally into beautiful, unexpected shapes, 
miracles of form, by a sort of natural genius in it for 
formal expression. And this form is never violent, 
is always subtly rounded, even when it is bare grey 
rocks ; and often breaks out deliciously into verdure, 
which is the ornament on form. There is some- 
thing in it, indeed, at times, of the highest kind of 
grotesque, pointing fingers, rocks which have grown 
almost human ; but in all this there is nothing 
trivial, for here the grotesque becomes for once a 
new, powerful kind of beauty. From the height of 
S. Jeronimo, the highest point of the mountain, a 
whole army of beckoning and threatening rocks 
comes up about one, climbing gigantically, among 
sheer precipices, tumultuously, in that place of great 
echoes. But they have the beauty of wild things, 
of those animals which are only half uncouth until 
man has tamed them, and shut them up in the 

123 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

awkwardness of prisoners. And they are solem- 
nised too, by the visible height to which they have 
dimbed into the serene air, out of a plain that rolls 
away, curve on curve, grey and ruddy, to the snow 
of the Pyrenees, and the broad, glittering, milk- 
white line of the Mediterranean. 

But the beauty of Montserrat lies in no detail, 
can be explained by no analysis: it is the beauty 
of a conscious soul, exquisite, heroic, sacred, ancient, 
in the midst of the immemorable peace, dignity, and 
endurance of high mountains. Without the mon- 
astery, the pilgrims, the worship of the Virgin, the 
chanting of the monks and of the Escolania (that 
school of ecclesiastical music which has existed here 
since the twelfth century), Montserrat would be a 
strange, beautiful thing indeed, a piece of true 
picturesque, but no more, not the unique thing that 
it is. Quite out of the world, singularly alone, one 
is in the presence of a great devotion; and in the 
pilgrims who come here, humble people with the 
grave and friendly gaiety of the Spaniard I found 
the only perfectly sympathetic company I have ever 
found about me in travelling. Life is reduced to 
its extreme simplicity : the white-washed cell, the 
attendance on oneself, the day marked only by one's 
wanderings over the mountain, or by the hours of 
worship. I went one morning to the "visitation 
of the Virgin," when the dark image is unveiled 
for the kisses of the pilgrims ; and I saw in the 
sacristy the innumerable votive offerings hanging 
on the walls, moulded limbs, naive (indeed hideous) 
124 



Montserrat. 

pictures representing the dangers from which the 
Virgin had saved her faithful, httle jackets of 
children who had been cured from sickness, great 
plaits of hair which women had cut off and hung 
there, in thankfulness for the saving of a husband. 
And I went every evening to the singing of the 
Salves at the Ave Maria, ending the daylight with 
that admirable chanting, in those deep, abstract 
voices of the monks, and with that sense of divine 
things, that repose, which always deepened or 
heightened in me, as I came out through the cloisters 
into the court of the plane trees, and looked up at 
the vast, obscure, mysteriously impending heights, 
gulfing downwards into unseen depths, with a kind 
of grateful wonder, as if all one's dreams had come 
true. 

And this sense of natural felicity, moved to 
astonishment, to the absoluteness of delight in being 
where one is, grew upon me during those three 
days of my visit, forming a new kind of sentiment, 
which I had never felt before, and which modified 
itself gently during the hours of the day, from the 
blitheness of the morning climb, through the con- 
tented acceptance of the afternoon sunshine, to that 
placid but solemn ending. For once, I was perfectly 
happy, and with that element of strangeness in my 
happiness without which I cannot conceive happiness. 

I have always held that it is unwise to ask of any 
perfect thing duration as well as existence. Supreme 
happiness, if it could be continued indefinitely, 
would in time, without losing its essence, lose its 

125 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

supremacy, which exists only by contrast. When I 
have seen a face, a landscape, an aspect of the sky, 
pass for a moment into a sort of crisis, in which it 
attained the perfect expression of itself, I have 
always turned away rapidly, closing my eyelids on 
the picture, which I dread to see fade or blur before 
me. I would obtain from things, as from people, 
only their best ; and I hold it to be not only wisdom 
towards oneself, but a point of honour towards them. 
Therefore, intending as I did to make a long stay 
in Montserrat, and having provided myself, in case 
of difficulty, with a letter to the Abbot, I left, 
without regret, at the end of the traditional three 
days, certain that I could get nothing more poignant 
in its happiness than what those three days had 
given me, and that by leaving at the moment of 
perfection I was preserving for myself an incom- 
parable memory, which would always rise for me, 
out of the plain of ordinary days, like the mountain 
itself, Monsalvat, where I had perhaps seen the 
Holy Graal. 

Winter, 1898. 



126 



Cadiz. 

In the spring of 1899 I spent five days at Cadiz. 
I was waiting for a summons to cross over to Tangier, 
a summons which, as it happened, never came, or 
was never obeyed. But that expectation gave me, 
all the time I was there, a peculiar sensation, a rest- 
lessness, an unsettled feeling, as of one pausing by 
the way. I was alone, unoccupied, I had one of 
those dark, windowless rooms at my hotel, opening 
inwards, which Spaniards seem to find quite natural, 
but which it is not easy for a stranger to feel com- 
fortable in. I walked about the streets all day, 
and along the Muelle looking down on the harbour, 
and along the Alameda and the Parque Genoves 
looking down on the sea, and along the rough, 
unpaved Recinto del Sur, against which the sea is 
always tossing. If I walked long enough in any 
direction I came out upon a great white wall and the 
sea. I felt as if I were on a narrow island, waiting 
for a ship to deliver me. 

All Cadiz is tall and white, built high, because 
there is only a neck of land to build on, and the 
breath of the sea is in every street. Walking, even 
in the centre of the town, one is conscious of the 
neighbourhood of another, an uncertain and shifting, 
element. The people who passed me seemed as 
conscious as I of this restless friend or enemy at 
their doors. Some of them had but just landed 
from the ships in the harbour, others were just 
going out to sea in them. Every day there were 
diff^erent people in the streets ; I had not time to 

127 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

get accustomed to seeing them before they were 
gone. No one seemed to be expected to stay there 
long. I felt almost ashamed, as day followed day, 
and I was still there ; I felt as if people were wonder- 
ing why I, too, did not go on. 

Every town, I suppose, in every country, has its 
Sunday evening walk, along a certain route ; and 
the Sunday evening walk at Cadiz is downward 
from the Plaza de la Constitucion, through the Calle 
del Duque de Tetuan and a series of narrow, twisting 
streets to the Plaza de Isabel II., or to the Cathedral, 
or to the slanting, queerly shaped market-place, 
where the sea-wind, which you have been leaving 
behind as you go farther from the, bay, meets you 
again, blowing up from the open sea. This walk 
through streets reminded me of the winding prom- 
enade of the Venetians, from the Piazza di San 
Marco along the Merceria to the Rialto. Cadiz, 
too, like Venice, an "all-but-island," comes natu- 
rally to adopt the same way of pacing to and fro 
within its narrow limits. Many of the people go 
on walking until ten ; some drop off into theatres 
or cafes. A circus, when I was there, had taken 
one of the theatres ; I stood by the entrance to the 
ring among the jockeys, and heard them talking 
English ; the sight of the horses put all thought of 
the sea out of my mind. 

On Sunday afternoon every one walked in the 
park ; the women wore their best clothes ; and I 
watched them pass and re-pass, with a feeling which 
I was not used to feel in Spain. There was some- 
128 



Cadiz. 

thing modern, fashionable, Parisian, in these toilettes, 
an aim at Parisian taste — a little extravagantly 
followed, it must be admitted. And these women 
had a look (what shall I say ?) more French than the 
women I had seen anywhere else in Spain. They 
had, indeed, the perfect Spanish calmness, but with 
it a slight self-consciousness, almost coquetry, with 
less of the sleepy animal. Is it merely fancy, or the 
unconscious prejudice of a Latin tradition, which 
makes me think that the Gaditanae are really, in 
some sense, "improbae," more than other Anda- 
lusian women .? Perhaps it is only that they are 
less absorbed in themselves, more attentive to those 
who look at them, winningly aware of their sex, 
as their eyes show. They are taller, slighter, and 
fairer than the women of Seville, their faces are more 
neatly finished, the nose more delicately curved, 
the eyelids very arched, the eyes wide open and 
very active. Here not only the women of the 
upper and lower classes, but of the middle classes 
as well, have more than the usual Spanish piquancy 
in their smooth oval faces. Is there something in 
the sea itself, or is it only the natural hazards of that 
mixture of races which a position by the sea brings 
about ? Certainly the women of Cadiz are not like 
other Spanish women. 

There is nothing to see in Cadiz, only the white 
houses, and the ships in the harbour, and the water 
surging and swinging against the walls. At night 
I used to wander on the desolate stretch of ground 
behind the Cathedral, pushing my way against the 

129 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

wind until I leaned over the wall, and could watch 
the grey waves heaving up and down with the long 
roll of the Atlantic. They were white at the edge, 
where they pushed hard at the wall, and sank back, 
and pushed hard at it again. A chill wind blew 
across them, with a dreary and melancholy sound. 
I listened anxiously; for once the sea gave me no 
pleasure. I wanted to be on the other side of it, 
under the African sun, with the friend from whom 
I was waiting to hear. I was impatient at being 
still in Europe. 

Spring, 1899. 



130 



A Bull Fight at Valencia. 

I HAVE always held that cruelty has a deep root in 
human nature, and is not that exceptional thing 
which, for the most part, we are pleased to suppose 
it. I believe it has an unadmitted, abominable 
attraction for almost every one ; for many of us, 
under scrupulous disguises ; more simply for 
others, and especially for people of certain races ; 
but the same principle is there, under whatever 
manifestation, and, if one takes one's stand on 
nature, claiming that whatever is deeply rooted 
there has its own right to exist, what of the natural 
rights of cruelty ? The problem is troubling me 
at the moment, for I was at a Spanish bull fight 
yesterday, the first I had ever seen ; and I saw many 
things there of a nature to make one reflect a little 
on first principles. 

The Plaza de Toros at Valencia is the largest 
in Spain. It holds 17,000 people, nearly 3000 
more than those of Barcelona, Seville, and Madrid. 
Yesterday it was two-thirds full, and, looking from 
my seat in the second row of boxes, that is, from 
the highest point of the house, I saw an immense 
blue circle filling the space between the brown 
sand of the arena and the pale blue sky overhead. 
The Sol, the side of the sun, the cheaper side, was 
opposite to me, and the shimmer of blue came 
from the gradas, where the blue blouses of the 
workmen left the darker clothes of their neigh- 
bours and the occasional coloured dress of a woman 
hardly distinguishable as more than a slight variation 

131 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

in a single tone of colour. Below me was the Presi- 
dent's box, and halfway round to the right the band, 
which, punctually at three, began to play a march 
as a door in the arena, immediately opposite to me, 
was thrown open, and the procession came in — the 
espadas and banderilleros in their pink and gold, 
with their bright cloaks, v/alking, the picadores, 
pike in hand, on their horses, the chulos following. 
There were to be eight bulls, four in plaza partida, 
that is, with a barrier dividing the arena into two 
halves, and four in lidia ordinaria, with the whole 
of the arena. As soon as the men were in their 
places a trumpet was blown, two doors in the arena 
were thrown open, and two bulls, each with a 
rosette on his neck, galloped in. The two fights 
went on simultaneously, in the traditional three 
acts — the Suerte de Picar, when the picadores, on 
horseback and holding long wooden pikes with a 
short head, meet the bull ; the Suerte de Banderillera, 
when the banderilleros plant their coloured darts 
in his neck; and the Suerte de Matar, when the 
espada, with his sword and his red cloth, gives 
the death-blow. Each fight lasted about half an 
hour, and was divided into its three acts by the 
sound of trumpets. 

The first act might be called the Massacre of 
the Horses. There is no pretence of fighting, 
and the picador rarely attempts to save his horse, 
although nothing would be easier ; on the contrary, 
the horse is deliberately offered to the bull, with 
the very considerable chance, of course, that the 
132 



A Bull Fight at Valencia. 

picador himself may be wounded through his pads, 
or as he rolls over with his horse. The horses are 
old and lean, one eye is often bandaged, and if, as 
they often do, they press back in terror against 
the barrier, or become unmanageable, a red-coated 
chulo comes forward and takes the bridle, and 
another follows with a stick, and the horse is led 
up to the bull and placed sideways to receive the 
charge. The bull, who has not the slightest desire 
to attack the horse, is finally teased into irritation 
by the red coats and by the pink cloaks, which are 
tossed and flaunted before him ; he paws the ground, 
puts down his head, and charges. The pike 
pricks him, and his horns plunge into the horse's 
belly, or are caught on the loose wooden saddle, 
or, as happened once yesterday, scrape the picador's 
leg. The cloaks are flourished again, and the bull 
follows them. Then the horse, if he is still on his 
feet, is again turned to the bull. There is a great 
red hole in him, and the blood drips ; but he is 
dragged and beaten forward. The bull plunges 
at him a second time, and this time he rolls over 
with his rider, who scrambles out from under him, 
his yellow clothes stained with red. Then one 
chulo takes the bridle and beats the horse on the 
head, and another chulo drags him by the tail, and, 
if he can, he staggers to his feet. He is literally 
falling to pieces, he has not ten minutes to live ; 
but the saddle is thrown on him again and the picador 
helped into the saddle. He makes a few steps, the 
picador drives his heels into him, and then jumps 

133 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

off as he falls for the last time and lies kicking on 
the ground, a torn and battered and sopping mass. 
Then a chulo goes up to him, hits him on the head 
to see if he can be made to get up again, and, finding 
it useless, takes out a long, gimlet-hke dagger, 
and drives it in behind his ear. Then, keeping 
an eye on the bull, the chulo scrapes up the blood 
clotted among the sand into a basket, and strews 
fresh sand about. Meanwhile another horse is 
being butchered, and the bull's horns have turned 
crimson, and his neck, where the pike has stuck 
into him, begins to redden in a thin line down each 
side. 

The trumpet sounds again, and if one of the 
horses is still living he is led back to the stables, 
to be used a second time. Now comes what is 
really skill in the performance, the planting of the 
banderilleras. The bull has tasted blood, he is 
still untired, and but slightly wounded. Little 
shouts of delight went through the house, and I 
could not but join in the applause, as Velasco nodded 
to the bull and waved the banderilleras close to his 
eyes, between his very horns, and planted them 
full-face before he leapt sideways. And Velasco's 
play with the cloak : the whole house rose to its 
feet, in fear and admiration, once as he wiped the 
ground with it, only its own length from the bull, 
again and again and again, and then, wrapping it 
suddenly about him with its white side outwards, 
turned his back on the bull, and stood still. 

The trumpet sounds again, and the espada takes 

134 



A Bull Fight at Valencia. 

his sword and his muleta, and goes out for the last 
scene. This, which ought to be, is not always the 
real climax. The bull is often by this time tired, 
has had enough of the sport, leaps at the barrier, 
trying to get out. He is tired of running after 
red rags, and he brushes them aside contemptuously ; 
he can scarcely be got to show animation enough 
to be decently killed. But one bull that I saw yester- 
day was splendidly savage, and fought almost to 
the last, running about the arena with the sword 
between his shoulders, and that great red line 
broadening down each side of his neck on the black — 
like a deep layer of red paint, one tricks oneself into 
thinking. He carried two swords in his neck, and 
still fought ; when at last he, too, got weary, and 
he went and knelt down before the door by which 
he had entered, and would fight no more. But 
they went up to him from outside the barrier, and 
drew the swords out of him ; and he got to his feet 
again, and stood to be killed. 

As the espada bows and renders up his sword 
the doors of the arena are thrown open, and there 
is a sound of bells. Teams of mules, decked with 
red and yellow bows and rosettes all over their 
heads and their collars, are driven in, a rope is 
fastened to the heads of the dead horses and to the 
horns of the dead bulls, and they are dragged out 
at full speed, one after the other, each tracing a 
long, curving line in the sand. Then the trumpets 
are blown, and the next fight begins. 

I sat there, in my box, from three until half-past 

135 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

five, when the eighth bull was killed in the half- 
darkness. Two men had been slightly wounded 
and ten horses killed — a total which, for eight 
bulls, as El Taurino said next day, dice bien poco en 
favor de los mismos. An odour, probably of bad 
tobacco, which my imagination insisted on accepting 
as the scent of blood, came up into my nostrils, 
where it remained all that night. Out of the open 
sky a bird flew now and again, darted hurriedly 
to and fro, and escaped into the free air. Women 
were sitting around me, with their children on their 
knees. When a horse had been badly gored, a 
lady sitting next to me put up her opera-glasses 
to see it better. There was no bravado in it. It 
was simple interest. 

There were moments when that blue circle, as 
I turned my head away from the arena, seemed to 
swim before my eyes. But I quickly turned back 
to the arena again ; I hated, sickened, and looked ; 
and I could not have gone out until the last bull 
had been killed. The bulls were by no means a 
good ganado ; I could have wished them more 
spirited. The odds are so infinitely in favour of 
the bull-fighter; he can always count on the pause 
which the bull makes between one rush and another, 
and on the infallible diversion of the red rag. It is 
a game of agility, presence of mind, sureness of 
foot and hand ; dangerous enough, certainly, but 
not more dangerous than the daily exercises of an 
equilibrist. But there is always that odd chance, 
like the gambler's winning number, which may 
136 



A Bull Fight at Valencia. 

turn up — the chance of a false step, a miscalculation, 
and the bull's horns in a man's body. The small 
probability of such a thing, and yet the possibility 
of it ; these, combined, are two of the motives 
which bring people to the bull-fight. 

Yet I cannot help thinking, suppress the Suerte 
de Picar, and you suppress the bull-fight. This 
is the one abomination and the abominable attrac- 
tion. I have described it with as much detail as 
I dare, and even now I feel that I have hardly 
rendered the whole horror of it. Coming away from 
the Plaza, I saw every horse I passed in the street, 
as I had seen those horses, with gaping and dripping 
sides, rearing back against the barrier, and dragged 
and beaten up to the horns of the bull. Well, 
that red plunge of horns into the living flesh, that 
living body ripped and lifted and rolled to the 
ground, that monstrous visible agony dragging 
itself about the sand ; and, along with this, the rider 
rolling off, indeed, on the safe side, but, for the 
moment, indistinguishable from his living barrier, 
and with only that barrier between him and the 
horns — it is this that one holds one's breath to see, 
and it is to hold one's breath that one goes to the 
bull-fight. 

The cruelty of human nature — what is it ? and 
how is it that it has struck root so deep ^ I realise 
it more clearly, and understand it less than ever, 
since I have come from that novillada at Valencia. 

Winter, 1898. 

137 



Alicante. 

I REACHED Alicante during this last stormy night, 
seeing something of the country we were passing 
through by lightning flashes ; and when I went 
out this morning the roads were heaped with the 
mud of a night's rain. The sun shone, and bright 
drops of rain fell, drying as they fell, under that 
almost tropical heat ; and as I found myself, sud- 
denly, a dozen steps from the door of my hotel, 
standing under a palm tree on a beach where bare- 
footed sailors were dragging up the boats, with 
the whole shining sea before me, green and silver 
and pale grey to the abrupt edge of the horizon, 
where blue-black clouds rose like a glittering wall, 
I could have fancied myself scarcely in Europe. I 
lingered there for some time, making the most 
of that sensation of friendly isolation which the 
sudden, unexpected presence of the sea always 
brings to me, and then began to walk slowly along 
the Paseo, under the double row of palm trees, 
watching the ships rocking in the harbour; one 
of them, no larger than a fishing vessel, a Cornish 
boat, the Little Mystery of Fowey. I walked under 
the palms the whole length of the harbour, and 
stopped when I came to the great mole and the 
further beach, on which the waves were coming 
in. No waves have the same way of coming in 
on any two shores. These were stealthy, sudden, 
rising unexpectedly out of a smooth surface, as a 
snake rises out of the grass, and then gliding forward 
with a rushing subsidence. I walked out on the 
138 



Alicante. 

mole, and sat down at the very end, where an old 
fisherman was paddling in his boat after crabs ; 
and then for the first time I saw Alicante. 

I saw, across the blue, swaying water of the 
harbour, an immense, bare, brown rock, lined with 
fortifications, crowned with a castle, and at its foot 
a compact mass of flat, white houses, which trailed 
off to the left into apparently a single line along the 
water, white and blue and mauve and pink, on the 
other side of that double row of palm trees, and with 
a surprising effect of elegance. Near the centre, 
one or two blue domes, towers topped with blue, 
square grey towers, rose from among the low roofs ; 
two high banks of rock continued the central mass 
to the right, with gaps between, after which a low 
curve of bare rock ended the bay. Behind, a low 
range of hills, rising and falling in peaks and broken 
curves, bare for the clouds to paint their colours 
on, shut off this bright edge of seashore from the 
world. 

I have been lounging about the harbour all day, 
merely drinking in sunshine and sea air, and as yet 
I know nothing of Alicante. But to-night, walking 
about these muddy streets in which the mud is 
like that on a deep country road, and watching 
the people who pass to and fro at that hour of five, 
when, in Spain, everybody is in the street, I figure 
Alicante to myself as a rough, violent little place, 
still barbarous. And, looking down from the high 
Plaza de Ramiro, those singular, neat little cabins 
on the seashore, bathing-cabins, I suppose, let for 

139 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

the season, and at other times hved in by the people 
of the place, might be huts on a savage beach, as 
they stand there under the palm trees. And the 
clouds are growing stormier over the sea, stained 
with bright, watery colours, green and rose, towards 
the sunset; darkness is coming on; a steamer 
glides out across the water, straight into the stormy 
clouds, through which a soft, pink lightning flushes 
at intervals. 

I am beginning to know Alicante. All this 
morning I have been wandering through the bye- 
streets, seeing the whole life of the place as I pass, 
in doorways and at windows, and in houses thrown 
wide open to the street. I might almost be seeing 
hill-tribes squatting in their caves. The streets, 
rising from about the harbour, beyond the one or 
two regular, level streets with shops, are planted 
as irregularly as the streets of Le Puy or of St. 
Ives. Often steps lead from one level to another; 
and houses are of different heights, thrown together 
at random, a one-storied house by the side of a 
three-storied house; and they rise or dwindle 
upwards and downwards until they seem to merge 
imperceptibly into the hill itself. As in the East, 
women are to be seen all day long going to the well 
with their pitchers, which they carry on their hips, 
with one arm thrown round them. And these 
women, the women who sit at their doors, sewing, 
or making lace, or knitting, or reading, or talking, 
have in their faces a ruddy darkness which I have 
as yet rarely seen in Spain, the colour of the pure 
140 



Alicante. 

Moor, every shade of colour, from a dead olive to 
a black-brown lit as by an inner fire. Sometimes 
the black blood shows in flat nose and thick lips, 
sometimes in bushy eyebrows meeting; some- 
times the outline of features is almost Mongolian. 
And there is not a link in the chain which joins 
the Moor and the Spaniard, not a gradation in the 
whole series of types, which is not to be seen here, 
in these heterogeneous streets. 

To-night, just before Vespers, I went into the 
church of Santa Maria, which fills one side of a 
little square, high up, from which, as from a lofty 
platform, one can see the sea, over and between 
the houses. It was quite dark as I entered, and, 
feeling my way, I came through a side chapel to an 
iron gate, which stood open, through which I saw 
some one in a far corner with a lighted candle in 
his hand, and, near to me, a long dark figure moving 
mechanically, which I did not at first distinguish 
as a man pulling a bell-rope. I stumbled forward 
and looked about me. At first it seemed to me 
that I had found my way into a crypt, with side 
crypts all round. Gradually I perceived a Gothic 
vaulting and the arches of side chapels, which 
succeeded one another without division down the 
whole length of the church. A tiny light twinkled 
here and there from a suspended lamp. I saw a 
kneehng figure in black; the sacristan passed on 
the other side of the arches with his candle, which 
he blew out, and the church returned to its silent 
darkness. 

141 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

This morning the sea has been magnificently- 
joyous. I have been spending hours on the two 
branches of the mole which closes in the harbour, 
watching its bright extravagances ; and now, as 
afternoon advances, the fishing boats are coming 
home, like great white birds, one after the other, 
with wings lifted. The first has already passed 
me, entered the harbour. Never was there a 
harbour so delicate, so elegant, with its ample 
space, its whiteness, the exquisite lines which the 
bare masts and yard-arms make against the palm 
trees, which one sees through swaying cordage 
and between half-reefed sails. Ships here are 
what they should be, the humanising part of the 
sea's beauty; and they are still as much as ever a 
part of the sea as they are lifted on these moving 
tides, inside the harbour, and along the quay. At 
night I am watching them again, under a sunset 
blackening the West with darkness, and devour- 
ing the darkness with flame. The whole harbour 
burns, and the masts rise into the fiery sky, out of 
the purple water, and across violet mountains. 

And so day follows day in a happy monotony. 
I spent yesterday at Elche, a little rocky town of 
palms, thirteen miles ofi^, which is really Africa in 
Spain. High up a bare, crumbling bank, rising 
from the yellow river, where lines of stooping women 
are pounding clothes, one sees, looking from the 
bridge, a crowd of squat, white square houses, set 
one beside and above another, like the dwellings 
of savage people, blank walls with a few barred holes 
142 



Alicante. 

for windows; above, a blue-domed church that 
might be a mosque. Palms overtop the walls, 
rise in the midst of the houses, swarm in forests up 
to all the outskirts, stretch into the country among 
fields and groves of trees ; and along all the alleys 
flow variable streams, arrested and set in motion 
by an elaborate system of dykes. Under that hot 
sun in mid-winter, following little paths between 
the rows of palms, which ended in their tuft of 
feathers and their cluster of yellow dates so high 
above my head, hearing from that height the long, 
lingering, Moorish songs of the date-pickers, perched 
there with ropes about their waists, the mules waiting 
below with their panniers for the burdens, I seemed 
far from even Alicante, really deep in the tropics, 
and not (as I forced myself to reflect) a day's journey 
from Madrid. 

It is after all with relief, as if I have shaken 
off some not quite explicable oppression, that I 
find myself back again at Alicante. How perfectly 
restful is this busy peace of the morning, in the blue 
harbour, where sea-gulls, white and black, fly among 
the ships ; and in the bluer bay, where from moment 
to moment a great sail, passing close to land, blots 
out the sunshine which lies glittering on the placidly 
wrinkHng water ! As the boats pass, the men 
bending to their oars and stooping under the sail, 
I can see them taking silver fishes out of dark nets. 
Sails whiten on the horizon against a dull cloud, 
and darken against clouds shining with sunlight. 
The long plash of the tide coils in about the rocks 

143 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

at my feet. They are loading the ships with a 
slow, rhythmical roll of machinery. Across the 
harbour a bell is tolling. All the rest is warm 
silence. 



Spring, 1898. 



144 



A Spanish Music-Hall. 

I AM aficionado, as a Spaniard would say, of music- 
halls. They amuse me, and I am always grateful 
to any one or anything that amuses me. The 
drama, if it is to be looked on as an art at all, is 
a serious art, to be taken seriously ; the art of the 
music-hall is admittedly frivolous — the consecra- 
tion of the frivolous. The more it approaches the 
legitimate drama the less characteristic, the less 
interesting it is. Thus what are called in England 
"sketches" are rarely tolerable; they may be 
endured. If I want a farce I will go elsewhere. I 
come to the music-hall for dancing, for singing, for 
the human harmonies of the acrobat. And I come 
for that exquisite sense of the frivolous, that air of 
Bohemian freedom, that relief from respectability 
which one gets here, and nowhere more surely than 
here. In a music-hall the audience is a part of the 
performance. The audience in a theatre, besides 
being in itself less amusing, is on its best behaviour ; 
you do not so easily surprise its "humours." Here 
we have a tragic comedy in the box yonder, a 
farce in the third row of the stalls, a scene from a 
ballet in the promenade. The fascination of these 
private performances is irresistible; and they are 
so constantly changing, so full of surprises, so 
mysterious and so clear. 

And then it is so amusing to contrast the Pavilion 
with the Trocadero, to compare the Eldorado with 
La Scala ; to distinguish just the difference, on the 
stage and off, which one is certain to find at Collins's 

145 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and the Metropolitan, at La Cigale and the Divan 
Japonais. To study the individuality of a music- 
hall, as one studies a human individuality, that is 
by no means the least profitable, the least interesting 
of studies. 

At the beginning of last May I spent a few days 
at Barcelona, and one night I went to the Alcazar 
Espafiol, the most characteristic place I could find, 
extremely curious to see what a Spanish music- 
hall would be like. It was very near my hotel, in 
a side street turning out of the Rambla, and I had 
heard through the open window the sound of music 
and of voices. I got there early, a little before 
nine. The entrance was not imposing, but it was 
covered with placards which had their interest. I 
pushed open the swing-doors and found myself 
in a long vestibule, at the other end of which was 
a sort of counter, which did duty for a box-ofl&ce. 
I paid, went down a step or two, and through 
another door. There was a bar at one end of the 
room, and a few small tables placed near two em- 
brasures, through which one saw an inner room. 
This was the hall. At one end was a little stage; 
the curtain was down, and the musicians' chairs 
and desks were vacant. Except for the stage, and 
for a gallery which ran along one side and the other 
end, the room was just like an ordinary cafe. There 
were the usual seats, the usual marble-topped 
tables, the usual glasses, and, lounging sleepily in 
the corners, the usual waiters. Two or three people 
stood at the bar, a few more were drinking coffee 
146 



A Spanish Music-Hall. 

or aguardiente at the tables. Presently two women 
came in and began to arrange one another's dresses 
in the corner. Two of the performers, I thought, 
and rightly. Then a few more people came in, 
and a few more, and the place gradually filled. 
The audience was not a distinguished one. None 
of the women wore hats, and few of them assumed 
an air of too extreme superiority to the waiters. 
Two fantastic creatures at a table next to me seemed 
to find it pleasant as well as profitable to be served 
by a waiter who would sit down at the same table 
and pay open court to them. Women would appear 
and disappear at the door leading into the next 
room, the room with the bar. The red door by 
the side of the stage — the stage-door — began to 
open and shut. And now the musicians were 
assembling. The grey-haired leader of the or- 
chestra, smoking a cigar, brought in the score. 
He sat down at his piano and handed round the 
sheets of music. The members of the orchestra 
brought newspapers with them. The man who 
played the clarionet was smoking a cigarette fixed 
in an interminable holder. He did his duty by his 
instrument in the overture that followed, but he 
never allowed the cigarette to go out. I thought 
the performance remarkable. 

The band, for a music-hall of no higher preten- 
sions, was extremely good. It had the genuine 
music-hall swing, and a sympathetic delicacy which 
I had not expected. The overture sounded very 
Spanish. It was a potpourri of some kind, with 

147 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

much variety of airs, a satisfying local colour. After 
the overture the curtain rose on a mise en scene of 
astonishing meagreness. It was a zarzuela — a 
"sketch" — called L'Ecrin du Shah de Perse^ in 
which the principal performer was Mile. Anna 
Durmance, a lady who spoke excellent French on 
occasion, but who looked and acted as only a 
Spaniard could look and act. The Spaniards 
have very little talent for acting. They lack 
flexibility, they have not the instinctive sense of 
the situation, such as every Frenchman and every 
Frenchwoman possess by right of birth. The 
men move spasmodically, as if galvanised. The 
women place themselves — gracefully, of course — 
in certain positions, because they know that such 
positions are required. They use the appropriate 
gestures, their faces assume certain expressions ; 
but it is all done with the air of one who has learnt 
a lesson. And the lesson has evidently been a 
difficult one. The zarzuela was amusing in its 
wildly farcical way — a farce of grotesque action, 
of incredible exaggeration. There was a great 
deal of excited movement, a series of rather dis- 
connected episodes, a good deal of noise. Anna 
Durmance was best in a scene where she came on 
as a washerwoman. Spaniards, with whom the 
washerwoman's art is of public interest, an element 
of the picturesque, are very fond of personating 
washerwomen, and they do it particularly well. 
There were other moments when Mile. Durmance 
was excellent; certain gestures, a typically Spanish 
148 



A Spanish Music- Hall. 

way of walking. But one was not sorry when, 
in the usual sudden way, all the performers rushed 
together upon the stage; there were some ex- 
clamations, some laughter, some joining of hands, 
and the curtain was down amid a thunder of applause. 
The next performer was really a Frenchwoman. 
"Elle est afFreuse," said a dark Southerner near 
me, whose "meridional vivacity" was unmistakably 
in evidence, "mais elle a ete gracieuse." I could 
imagine she had once been very handsome. She 
was by no means "frightful" now, but one 'saw 
that she owed something to her "make-up." Her 
voice, as she sang some well-known French comic 
songs, in which my irrepressible neighbour joined 
from time to time, showed signs of having once 
been better. She was a great favourite with the 
audience, and in the pauses between the stanzas 
she would smile and nod to her friends here and 
there. I did not share in the enthusiasm, having 
heard the same songs much better given elsewhere. 
When, after an interval, she came on the stage 
again, dressed as a man, I was surprised to see how 
well she could look. She was to take charge of 
the Teatro Lilliputien, and she made her bow 
before disappearing behind the curtain. The Lilli- 
putian Theatre has not, I think, reached England, 
though it has long been at home in Paris. It is 
a contrivance after the style of a Punch and Judy 
show, only, instead of marionettes who do all the 
action, there is a combination between the operator 
and his puppets. As in a certain sort of caricature, 

149 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

one sees a large head supported by a tiny body, 
with finikin arms and legs, which move as they 
are worked from behind. The head is that of the 
performer, the rest belongs to the puppets ; and 
it is indeed comic to see the perfect sympathy 
which exists between the head which sings, the 
puppet hands which gesticulate, and the puppet 
legs which dance. The repertoire of these minia- 
ture theatres seems to be limited. The songs I 
heard at the Alcazar Espariol at Barcelona were 
almost without exception the same that I had heard 
at the Montagnes Russes at Paris. There was the 
same red-haired Englishman who danced a horn- 
pipe, the same "tenor qui monte le cou," the same 
caricature of the chorus of servant-girls in the 
Cloches de Corneville — *'Voyez par ci, voyez par la." 
More thunders of applause — Spanish audiences 
are inconceivably enthusiastic — and the French- 
woman was again bowing behind the footlights, 
drawing back rapidly to avoid the curtain which 
came down, as it had a way of doing, precipitately. 
After this we had some more music, and the 
curtain rose for the Baile espanol por las senoritas 
Espinosa. This, despite its name, was not so 
typically Spanish as I had expected. The two 
girls wore ballet-skirts, which are never used in the 
characteristic Spanish dances. They had castanets, 
however, and there was something neither French 
nor English in the rhythm of their long, sweeping 
movements, their turn backward upon themselves, 
their sudden way of ending a figure by a stamp on 
150 



A Spanish Music-Hall. 

the ground, followed by a pose of unexpected 
immobility. They gave us several dances. Be- 
tween whiles one could see them, in the very visible 
and haphazard coulisses on the prompt side of the 
stage, chatting together, signalling to their friends 
in the audience, giving a last twitch to their tights, 
a final pat of adjustment to the saucer skirts. 

As soon as this performance was over I saw 
four of the women at the other end of the room, 
whom I had already guessed to be some of the 
dancers, leave their places and make for the stage- 
door. The next entry on the programme was 
Baile Sevillanas, por las parejas madre e hija, Isabel 
Santos, y las hermanas Mazantini. Isabel Santos, 
the mother, was a vigorous, strongly-built, hard- 
featured, determined-looking woman of fifty. Her 
daughter was slight, graceful, delicately pink and 
white, very pretty and charming ; her face was 
perfectly sweet and simple, with something of a 
remote and dreamy look in the eyes. One of the 
sisters Mazantini was fat, ugly, and unattractive ; 
the other, a rather large woman, had an admirable 
figure and a gay and pleasant face. The curtain 
rose to a strange dance-measure. The four women 
took their places on the stage, facing one another 
by two and two. They raised their arms, the eight 
pairs of castanets clanged at once, and the dance 
began. Spanish dances have a certain resemblance 
with the dances of the East. One's idea of a dance, 
in England, is something in which all the movement 
is due to the legs. In Japan, in Egypt, the legs, 

151 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

have very little to do with the dance. The exquisite 
rhythms of Japanese dancers are produced by the 
subtle gesture of hands, the manipulation of scarves, 
the delicate undulations of the body. In Arab 
dances, in the danse du ventre, the legs are more 
motionless still. They are only used to assist in 
producing the extraordinary movements of the 
stomach and the hips in which so much of the dance 
consists. It is a dance in which the body sets itself 
to its own rhythm. Spanish dancing, which no 
doubt derives its Eastern colour from the Moors, 
is almost equally a dance of the whole body, and 
its particular characteristic — the action of the hips 
— is due to a physical peculiarity of the Spaniards, 
whose spines have a special and unique curve of 
their own. The walk of Spanish women has a 
world-wide fame : one meets a Venus Callipyge 
at every corner; and it is to imitate what in them 
is real and beautiful that the women of other nations 
have introduced the hideous mimicry of the "bustle." 
The Baile Sevillanas, with all its diflPerences, had a 
very definite resemblance to the Arab dances I 
had seen. It began with a gentle swaying move- 
ment in time to the regular clack-clack of castanets. 
Now the women faced one another, now they 
glided to and fro, changing places, as in a move- 
ment of the Lancers. The swaying movement 
of the hips became more pronounced ; the body 
moved in a sort of circle upon itself. And then 
they would cross and re-cross, accentuating the 
rhythm with a stamp of the heels. Their arms 
152 



A Spanish Music-Hall. 

waved and dipped, curving with the curves of 
the body. The dance grew more exciting, with a 
sort of lascivious suggestiveness, a morbid, perverse 
charm, as the women writhed to and fro, now 
languishingly, now furiously, together and apart. 
It ended with a frantic tremoussement of the hips, 
a stamp of the heels, and a last clang of the castanets 
as the arms grew rigid in the sudden immobility 
of the body. There were two encores and two 
more dances, much the same as the first, and then 
at last the curtain was allowed to descend, and 
the women went tranquilly back to the corner 
where they had been drinking coffee with their 
friends. 

When the curtain rose again, after a long in- 
terval, the stage was empty but for a wooden chair 
placed just in the middle. The chair was waiting 
for Senor Pon, who was to give us a concierto de 
guitarra. Senor Pon, a business-like person, bustled 
on to the stage, seized the chair, and placed it nearer 
the footlights, sat down, looked around for his 
friends in the casual and familiar manner peculiar 
to the place, and began to tune his guitar. Then 
he plucked softly at the wires, and a suave, delicious 
melody floated across the clink of glasses. One 
wanted moonlight, a balcony, a woman leaning 
over the balcony, while the serenade rose out of 
the shadow. But indeed one saw all that. Then 
the melody ceased, and the business-like Pon was 
bowing to the audience. There was a torrent of 
applause, and he sat down again, and struck up an 

153 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

imitative fantasia, in which one heard the bugles 
blowing the reveille, the march music of the troops, 
with clever reahstic effects, and a really wonderful 
command of the instrument. The piece ended 
suddenly, the musician sprang up, bowed, and 
retreated with his chair, to avoid the irrepressible 
curtain. But the audience insisted on another 
encore, and when he had given it — a charming 
air played charmingly — they howled persistently, 
but unavailingly, for more. 

Senor Pon was followed by Senorita Villaclara, 
a fair-complexioned woman, with dark, sleepy, 
wicked eyes, and black hair trailing over her fore- 
head, with little curls near the ears. The leader 
of the orchestra began to play on the piano a brief, 
monotonous air, and the woman — looking out 
between her half-shut eyes — began the Malaguena. 
It was a strange, piercing, Moorish chant, sung 
in a high falsetto voice, in long, acute, trembling 
phrases — a wail rather than a song — with pauses, 
as if to gain breath, between. A few words seemed 
to be repeated over and over again, with tremulous, 
inarticulate cries that wavered in time to a regularly 
beating rhythm. The sound was like nothing I 
have ever heard. It pierced the brain, it tortured 
one with a sort of delicious spasm. The next song 
had more of a regular melody, though still in this 
extraordinary strained voice, and still with something 
of a lament in its monotony. I could not under- 
stand the words, but the woman's gestures left no 
doubt as to the character of the song. It was 
154 



A Spanish Music-Hall. 

assertively indecent, but with that curious kind of 
indecency — an almost religious solemnity in per- 
former and audience — which the Spaniards share 
with the Eastern races. Another song followed, 
given with the same serious and collected indecency, 
and received with the same serious and collected 
attention. It had a refrain of "Alleluia!" and the 
woman, I know not why, borrowed a man's soft 
felt hat, turned down the brim, and put it on before 
beginning the song. When the applause was over 
she returned the hat, came back to the table at 
which she had been sitting, dismally enough, and 
yawned more desperately than ever. 

The dance which came next was described on 
the programme as a can-can. It was really more 
like the chahut than the can-can. Four people 
took part, two men and two women. One of the 
men was as horrible a creature as I have ever seen 
— a huge, clean-shaved, close-cropped, ashen-hued 
sort of human toad ; the other was preposterously 
tall and thin, all angles. Of the women, one was 
commonplace enough, with a seriousness worthy 
of Grille d'Egout, but the younger of the two, a 
piquant, amusing madcap, was as reckless as La 
Goulue. The band struck up a lively air from 
Madame Angot, and the quadrille naturaliste began. 
It was very like the chahut as one sees it at the 
Moulin Rouge, but there were differences, and the 
Spanish dance was certainly the merrier and the 
more like a quadrille, as certainly as it was a less 
elaborate and extraordinary performance. Skirts 

15s 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

whirled, legs shot into the air, there was a posturing, 
a pirouetting, and then each man seized his partner 
and led her round the stage at a gallop. Then 
the skirts rose and twirled again, the little shoes 
waved in the air, and the merry-faced woman 
laughed as she flung herself into the headlong 
movement of the dance. Not the least astonishing 
part of it was the series of hops by which the toad- 
like man defied every principle of equilibrium, now 
more than ever toad-like, as he squatted lumpishly 
on his heels. Dance followed dance, as tune changed 
to tune, and it was almost in a state of exhaustion 
that the quartet finally trailed off the stage. 

There was still another dance to be given, and 
by the performers of the Baile Sevillanas. It was 
something between that and the can-can, with the 
high-kicking of the latter, and the swaying move- 
ment, accentuated by the heels of the former. In 
response to an encore, Isabel Santos, the sturdy 
old veteran, came forward alone, and it was indeed 
half comic, and soon wholly impressive, to see this 
incredibly agile middle-aged woman go through 
the wild movements of the dance. She did it with 
immense spirit, flinging her legs into the air with 
a quite youthful vivacity ; she did it also with a 
profound artistic seriousness, which soon conquered 
one's inclination to see anything ridiculous or un- 
seemly in the performance. I am afraid the pretty 
daughter will never be such a dancer as the hard- 
featured mother. Isabel Santos the elder is, in 
her way, a great artist. 
156 



A Spanish Music-Hail. 

After this — it was now past midnight — there 
was nothing specially new or interesting in the few 
numbers that a too liberal management wasted on 
the few drinkers who still sat about the hall. The 
Provencal near me had gone, in his turbulent way; 
the two women at the next table were gathering 
up their shawls ; nearly all the glasses were empty, 
and no one clapped his hands for the waiter with 
the two kettles, the coffee and the milk. One by 
one the dancers left their corner and made for the 
door; and when, at last, Isabel Santos and her 
pretty daughter had said good-bye, I saw there 
was nothing to stay for, and I followed. 

1892. 



157 



11. 

London : A Book of 
Aspects. 



I. 

There is in the aspect of London a certain magnifi- 
cence : the magnificence of weight, sohdity, energy, 
imperturbabiUty, and an unconquered continuance. 
It is ahve from border to border, not an inch of it 
is not ahve. It exists, goes on, and has been 
going on for so many centuries. Here and there 
a stone or the fine of a causeway fixes a date. If 
you look beyond it you look into fog. It sums 
up and includes England. Materially England is 
contained in it, and the soul of England has always 
inhabited it as a body. We have not had a great 
man who has never lived in London. 

And London makes no display; it is there, 
as it has come, as fire and plagues have left it ; but 
it has never had either a Haussmann or a Nero. 
It has none of the straight lines of Paris nor the 
tall lines of Vienna nor the emphatic German 
monotony. It has not the natural aids of Con- 
stantinople, with seas and continents about it, nor 
of Rome, with its seven hills, and its traces of all 
the history of the world. It was set in fertile soil, 
which has still left it the marvellous green grass of 
its parks, and on a river which has brought beauty 
along its whole course. Great architects have left 
a few unspoilt treasures : Westminster Abbey, 
the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, an old church 
here and there. But for the most part the appeal 
of London is made by no beauty or eflfect in things 
themselves, but by the sense which it gives us of 
inevitable growth and impregnable strength, and 

i6i 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

by the atmosphere which makes and unmakes this 
vast and soHd city every morning and every evening 
with a natural magic pecuhar to it. 

English air, working upon London smoke, 
creates the real London. The real London is not 
a city of uniform brightness, like Paris, nor of 
savage gloom, like Prague; it is a picture con- 
tinually changing, a continual sequence of pictures, 
and there is no knowing what mean street corner 
may not suddenly take on a glory not its own. 
The English mist is always at work like a subtle 
painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for 
the mist to work on. The especial beauty of 
London is the Thames, and the Thames is so 
wonderful because the mist is always changing its 
shapes and colours, always making its light mysteri- 
ous, and building palaces of cloud out of mere 
Parliament Houses with their jags and turrets. 
When the mist collaborates with night and rain, 
the masterpiece is created. 

Most travellers come into London across the 
river, sometimes crossing it twice. The entrance, 
as you leave the country behind you, is ominous. 
If you come by night, and it is never wise to enter 
any city except by night, you are slowly swallowed 
up by a blank of blackness, pierced by holes and 
windows of dingy light ; foul and misty eyes of 
light in the sky; narrow gulfs, in which lights 
blink; blocks and spikes of black against grey; 
masts, as it were, rising out of a sea of mist ; then 
a whole street suddenly laid bare in bright light; 
162 



London. 

shoulders of dark buildings ; and then black shiny 
rails, and then the river, a vast smudge, dismal 
and tragic ; and, as one crosses it again, between 
the vast network of the bridge's bars, the impossible 
fairy peep-show of the Embankment. 

All this one sees in passing, in hardly more 
than a series of flashes; but if you would see 
London steadily from the point where its aspect 
is finest, go on a night when there has been rain to 
the footpath which crosses Hungerford Bridge by 
the side of the railway-track. The river seems to 
have suddenly become a lake ; under the black 
arches of Waterloo Bridge there are reflections of 
golden fire, multiplying arch beyond arch, in a 
lovely tangle. The Surrey side is dark, with tall 
vague buildings rising out of the mud on which 
a little water crawls : is it the water that moves 
or the shadows ? A few empty barges or steamers 
lie in solid patches on the water near the bank; 
and a stationary sky-sign, hideous where it defaces 
the night, turns in the water to wavering bars of 
rosy orange. The buildings on the Embankment 
rise up, walls of soft greyness with squares of 
lighted windows, which make patterns across them. 
They tremble in the mist, their shapes flicker; it 
seems as if a breath would blow out their lights and 
leave them bodiless husks in the wind. From 
one of the tallest chimneys a reddish smoke floats 
and twists like a flag. Below, the Embankment 
curves towards Cleopatra's Needle : you see the 
curve of the wall, as the lamps hght it, leaving the 

163 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

obelisk in shadow, and falling faintly on the grey 
mud in the river. Just that corner has a mysterious 
air, as if secluded, in the heart of a pageant ; I 
know not what makes it quite so tragic and melan- 
choly. The aspect of the night, the aspect of 
London, pricked out in points of fire against an 
enveloping darkness, is as beautiful as any sunset 
or any mountain ; I do not know any more beautiful 
aspect. And here, as always in London, it is the 
atmosphere that makes the picture, an atmosphere 
like Turner, revealing every form through the 
ecstasy of its colour. 

It is not only on the river that London can 
make absolute beauty out of the material which 
lies so casually about in its streets. A London 
sunset, seen through vistas of narrow streets, has 
a colour of smoky rose which can be seen in no 
other city, and it weaves strange splendours, often 
enough, on its edges and gulfs of sky, not less 
marvellous than Venice can lift over the Giudecca, 
or Siena see stretched beyond its walls. At such 
a point as the Marble Arch you may see con- 
flagrations of jewels, a sky of burning lavender, 
tossed abroad like a crumpled cloak, with broad 
bands of dull purple and smoky pink, slashed with 
bright gold and decked with grey streamers ; you 
see it through a veil of moving mist, which darkens 
downwards to a solid block, coloured like lead, 
where the lighted road turns, meeting the sky. 

And there are a few open spaces, which at all 
times and under all lights are satisfying to the 
164 



London. 

eyes. Hyde Park Corner, for no reason in par- 
ticular, gives one the first sensation of pleasure as 
one comes into London from Victoria Station. 
The glimpse of the two parks, with their big gates, 
the eager flow of traffic, not too tangled or laborious 
just there, the beginning of Piccadilly, the lack of 
stiff'ness in anything: is it these that help to make 
up the impression .? Piccadilly Circus is always 
like a queer hive, and is at least never dead or 
formal. But it is Trafalgar Square which is the 
conscious heart or centre of London. 

If the Thames is the soul of London, and if 
the parks are its eyes, surely Trafalgar Square 
may well be reckoned its heart. There is no hour 
of day or night when it is not admirable, but for 
my part I prefer the evening, just as it grows dusk, 
after a day of heavy rain. How often have I walked 
up and down, for mere pleasure, for a pleasure 
which quickened into actual excitement, on that 
broad, curved platform from which you can turn 
to look up at the National Gallery, like a frontispiece, 
and from which you can look down over the dark 
stone pavement, black and shining with rain, on 
which the curved fountains stand with their inky 
water, while two gas-lamps cast a feeble light on 
the granite base of the Nelson monument and on 
the vast sulky lions at the corners. The pedestal 
goes up straight into the sky, diminishing the 
roofs, which curve downwards to the white clock- 
face, alone visible on the clock-tower at West- 
minster. Whitehall flows like a river, on which 

i6s 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

vague shapes of traffic float and are submerged. 
The mist and the twihght hide the one harmonious 
building in London, the Banqueting Hall. You 
realise that it is there, and that beyond it are the 
Abbey and the river, with the few demure squares 
and narrow frugal streets still left standing in 
Westminster. 

It is only after trying to prefer the parks and 
public gardens of most of the other capitals of 
Europe that I have come to convince myself that 
London can more than hold its own against them 
all. We have no site comparable with the site 
of the Pincio in Rome, none of the opalescent water 
which encircles the gardens at Venice, no Sierras 
to see from our Prado, not even a Berlin forest in 
the midst of the city; and I for one have never 
loved a London park as I have loved the Luxem- 
bourg Gardens ; but, if we will be frank with our- 
selves, and put sentiment or the prejudice of foreign 
travel out of our heads, we shall have to admit 
that in the natural properties of the park, in grass, 
trees, and the magic of atmosphere, London is not 
to be excelled. 

And, above all, in freshness. After the London 
parks all others seem dusty and dingy. It is the 
English rain, and not the care of our park-keepers, 
that brings this gloss out of the grass and gives 
our public gardens their air of country freedom. 
Near the Round Pond you might be anywhere 
except in the middle of a city of smoke and noise, 
and it is only by an unusually high roof or chimney, 
i66 



London. 

somewhere against the sky, far off, that you can 
realise where you are. The Serpentine will never 
be vulgarised, though cockneys paddle on it in 
boats ; the water in St. James's Park will always 
be kept wild and strange by the sea-gulls ; and the 
toy-boats only give an infantile charm to the steel- 
blue water of the Round Pond. You can go 
astray in long avenues of trees, where, in autumn, 
there are always children playing among the leaves, 
building tombs and castles with them. In summer 
you can sit for a whole afternoon, undisturbed, 
on a chair on that green slope which goes down 
to the artificial end of the Serpentine, where the 
stone parapets are, over the water from the peacocks. 
It is only the parks that make summer in London 
almost bearable. 

I have never been able to love Regent's Park, 
though I know it better than the others, and though 
it has lovely water-birds about its islands, and 
though it is on the way to the Zoological Gardens. 
Its flowers are the best in London, for colour, 
form, and tending. You hear the wild beasts, 
but no city noises. Those sounds of roaring, 
crying, and the voices of imprisoned birds are 
sometimes distressing, and are perhaps one of the 
reasons why one can never be quite happy or aloof 
from things in Regent's Park. The water there 
is meagre, and the boats too closely visible ; the 
children are poorer and seem more preoccupied 
than the children in the western parks. And 
there is the perplexing inner circle, which is as 

167 






V 
Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

difficult to get in or out of as its lamentable name- 
sake underground. Coming where it does, the 
park is a breathing-place, an immense relief; but 
it is the streets around, and especially the Mary- 
lebone Road, that give it its value. 

There remains what is more than a park, but 
in its way worth them all : Hampstead Heath. 
There are to be trains to bring poor people from 
the other end of London, philanthropic trains, 
but the heath will be spoilt, and it is almost the last 
thing left to spoil in London. Up to now, all the 
Saturday afternoons, the Sundays, the Bank Holi- 
days, have hardly touched it. There are hiding- 
places, even on these evil days, and if one fails there 
is always another. And if one has the good fortune 
to live near it, and can come out in the middle of 
the night upon Judges' Walk, when the moonlight 
fills the hollow like a deep bowl, and silence is like 
that peace which passeth understanding, everything 
else in London will seem trivial, a mere individual 
thing, compared with it. 

On the heath you are lifted over London, but 
you are in London. It is that double sense, that 
nearness and remoteness combined, the sight of 
St. Paul's from above the level of the dome, the 
houses about the pond in the Vale of Health, from 
which one gets so unparalleled a sensation. But 
the heath is to be loved for its own sake, for its 
peace, amplitude, high bright air and refreshment ; 
for its mystery, wildness, formality; for its grassy 
pools and hillocks that flow and return like waves 
i68 



Lond 



on. 



of the sea ; for its green grass and the white roads 
chequering it ; for its bracken, its mist and bloom 
of trees. Every knoll and curve of it draws the 
feet to feel their soft shapes ; one cannot walk, but 
must run and leap on Hampstead Heath. 



169 



II. 



As you come back into London from the country, 
out of air into smoke, rattling level with the chimney- 
pots, and looking down into narrow gulfs swarming 
with men and machines, you are as if seized in a 
gigantic grip. First comes a splendid but dis- 
heartening sense of force, forcing you to admire 
it, then a desperate sense of helplessness. London 
seems a vast ant-heap, and you are one more ant 
dropped on the heap. You are stunned, and 
then you come to yourself, and your thought revolts 
against the material weight which is crushing you. 
What a huge futility it all seems, this human ant- 
heap, this crawling and hurrying and sweating 
and building and bearing burdens, and never rest- 
ing all day long and never bringing any labour 
to an end. After the fields and the sky London 
seems trivial, a thing artificially made, in which 
people work at senseless toils, for idle and imaginary 
ends. Labour in the fields is regular, sane, in- 
evitable as the labour of the earth with its roots. 
You are in your place in the world, between the 
grass and the clouds, really alive and living as na- 
turala life as the beasts. In London men work as if 
in darkness, scarcely seeing their own hands as 
they work, and not knowing the meaning of their 
labour. They wither and dwindle, forgetting or 
not knowing that it was ever a pleasant thing merely 
to be alive and in the air. They are all doing 
things for other people, making useless "improve- 
ments," always perfecting the achievement of 
170 



London. 

material results with newly made tools. They 
are making things cheaper, more immediate in 
effect, of the latest modern make. It is all a hurry, 
a levelling downward, an automobilisation of the 
mind. 

And their pleasures are as their labours. In 
the country you have but to walk or look out of 
your window and you are in the midst of beautiful 
and living things : a tree, a dimly jewelled frog, 
a bird in flight. Every natural pleasure is about 
you : you may walk, or ride, or skate, or swim, or 
merely sit still and be at rest. But in London you 
must invent pleasures and then toil after them. 
The pleasures of London are more exhausting than 
its toils. No stone-breaker on the roads works 
so hard or martyrs his flesh so cruelly as the actress 
or the woman of fashion. No one in London 
does what he wants to do, or goes where he wants 
to go. It is a suffering to go to any theatre, any 
concert. There are even people who go to lectures. 
And all this continual self-sacrifice is done for 
"amusement." It is astonishing. 

London was once habitable, in spite of itself. 
The machines have killed it. The old, habitable 
London exists no longer. Charles Lamb could 
not live in this mechanical city, out of which every- 
thing old and human has been driven by wheels 
and hammers and the fluids of noise and speed. 
When will his affectionate phrase, "the sweet 
security of streets," ever be used again of London ? 
No one will take a walk down Fleet Street any more, 

171 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

no one will shed tears of joy in the "motley Strand," 
no one will be leisurable any more, or turn over 
old books at a stall, or talk with friends at the street 
corner. Noise and evil smells have filled the streets 
hke tunnels in dayUght ; it is a pain to walk in the 
midst of all these hurrying and clattering machines ; 
the multitude of humanity, that "bath" into 
which Baudelaire loved to plunge, is scarcely dis- 
cernible, it is secondary to the machines ; it is only 
in a machine that you can escape the machines. 
London that was vast and smoky and loud, 
now stinks and reverberates ; to live in it is to 
live in the hollow of a clanging bell, to breathe its 
air is to breathe the foulness of modern progress. 

London as it is now is the wreck and moral of 
civihsation. We are more civihsed every day, 
every day we can go more quickly and more un- 
comfortably wherever we want to go, we can have 
whatever we want brought to us more quickly 
and more expensively. We live by touching 
buttons and ringing bells, a new purely practical 
magic sets us in communication with the ends of 
the earth. We can have abominable mockeries 
of the arts of music and of speech whizzing in our 
ears out of metal mouths. We have outdone the 
wildest prophetic buffooneries of Villiers de I'lsle 
Adam, whose "celestial bill-sticking" may be 
seen nightly defacing the majesty of the river; 
here any gramophones can give us the equivalent 
of his "chemical analysis of the last breath." The 
plausible and insidious telephone aids us and 
172 



London. 

intrudes upon us, taking away our liberty from us, 
and leaving every Englishman's house his castle 
no longer, but a kind of whispering gallery, open 
to the hum of every voice. There is hardly a street 
left in London where one can talk with open win- 
dows by day and sleep with open windows by night. 
We are tunnelled under until our houses rock, 
we are shot through holes in the earth if we want 
to cross London; even the last liberty of Hamp- 
stead Heath is about to be taken from us by railway. 
London has civilised itself into the likeness of a 
steam roundabout at a fair; it goes clattering 
and turning, to the sound of a jubilant hurdy- 
gurdy; round and round, always on the same 
track, but always faster; and the children astride 
its wooden horses think they are getting to the 
world's end. 

It is the machines, more than anything else, 
that have done it. Men and women, as they 
passed each other in the street or on the road, saw 
and took cognisance of each other, human being 
of human being. The creatures that we see now 
in the machines are hardly to be called human 
beings, so are they disfigured out of all recognition, 
in order that they may go fast enough not to see 
anything themselves. Does any one any longer 
walk ? If I walk I meet no one walking, and I 
cannot wonder at it, for what I meet is an uproar, 
and a whizz, and a leap past me, and a bhnding 
cloud of dust, and a machine on which scarecrows 
perch is disappearing at the end of the road. The 

173 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

verbs to loll, to lounge, to dawdle, to loiter, the 
verbs precious to Walt Whitman, precious to every 
lover of men and of himself, are losing their currency ; 
they will be marked "o" for obsolete in the diction- 
aries of the future. All that poetry which Walt 
Whitman found in things merely because they 
were alive will fade out of existence like the Red 
Indian. It will live on for some time yet in the 
country where the railway has not yet smeared its 
poisonous trail over the soil; but in London there 
will soon be no need of men, there will be nothing 
but machines. 

There was a time when it was enough merely 
to be alive, and to be in London, Every morning 
promised an adventure; something or some one 
might be waiting at the corner of the next street; 
it was difficult to stay indoors because there were 
so many people in the streets. I still think, after 
seeing most of the capitals of Europe, that there is 
no capital in Europe where so many beautiful 
women are to be seen as in London. Warsaw 
comes near, for rarity; not for number. The 
streets and the omnibuses were always alive with 
beauty or with something strange. In London 
anything may happen. "Adventures to the ad- 
venturous ! " says somebody in Contarini Fleming. 
But who can look as high as the uneasy faces 
on a motor-omnibus, who can look under the 
hoods and goggles in a motor-car ? The roads 
are too noisy now for any charm of expression to 
be seen on the pavements. The women are 
174 



London. 

shouting to each other, straining their ears to hear. 
They want to get their shopping done and to get 
into a motor-car or a motor-omnibus. 

Could another Charles Lamb create a new 
London ? 



175 



III. 

How much of Lamb's London is left? "London 
itself a pantomime and a masquerade" is left, and 
"a mind that loves to find itself at home in crowds" 
is never without those streets and pavements to 
turn by its alchemy into pure gold. "Is any night- 
walk comparable," as he asks, and need not have 
waited for an answer, "to a walk from St. Paul's 
to Charing Cross, for lighting and paving, crowds 
going and coming without respite, the rattle of 
coaches and the cheerfulness of shops?" "St. 
Paul's Churchyard!" he cries, "the Strand! 
Exeter Change ! Charing Cross, with the man 
upon the black horse ! These are thy gods, O 
London ! " One has to turn to the notes on the 
letters to find out that Exeter Change was "a great 
building, with bookstalls and miscellaneous stalls 
on the ground floor and a menagerie above." How 
delicious that sounds! But then "it was de- 
molished in 1829." Temple Bar has gone, and 
the griffin, which would have seemed to Lamb as 
permanent as London Stone. Staple Inn would 
have been less of an anomaly to him in "noble 
Holborn" than it is to us, as it stands, with an aged 
helplessness, not far ofi^ from the useful horrors of 
Holborn Viaduct, a "modern improvement" which 
has swept away the old timbered houses that used 
to make an island in the middle of the street. Like 
all old London, that is not hidden away in a corner 
(as St. John's Gateway is, on its hill at the back of 
Smithfield, and St. Bartholomew's Church, which 
176 



London. 

hinders nobody's passing, and the Charterhouse, 
which has so far held its own), they have had to 
make way for the traffic, that traffic which is steadily 
pushing down the good things that are old and 
shouldering up the bad new things that will be 
temporary. We have still, and for historic and 
royal reasons will always have, Westminster Abbey : 
the Beautiful Temple, as Lamb called it, when he 
was religiously occupied in "shaming the sellers 
out of the Temple." A church that is not in the 
way of a new street, or does not intrude over the 
edge of a new widening, is, for the most part, safe. 
But we, who live now, have seen Christ's Hospital, 
that comely home and fosterer of genius, pulled 
down, stone by stone, its beautiful memory obliter- 
ated, because boys, they say, want country air. 
That was one of the breathing-places, the old quiet 
things, that helped to make the city habitable. 
Newgate has been pulled down, and with Newgate 
goes some of the strength and permanence of 
London. There was a horrible beauty in those 
impregnable grey stone walls, by the side of the 
city pavement. The traffic has fallen upon them 
like a sea, and they have melted away before it. 

Lamb saw London changing, and to the end 
he said, "London streets and faces cheer me in- 
expressibly, though of the latter not one known 
one were remaining." But to his sister it seemed 
that he "found it melancholy," "the very streets," 
he says, "altering every day." Covent Garden, 
where he lived, has lasted ; the house he lived in 

177 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

still stands looking into Bow Street. And the 
Temple, that lucky corner of the City which is 
outside city jurisdiction, has been little spoiled 
by time, ot the worse improvements of restorers. 
But I ask myself what Lamb would have said if he 
had lived to see tram-lines sliming the bank of the 
river, and the trees amputated to preserve the hats 
of living creatures, in what way better or more 
worthy of attention than those trees ? 

When I see London best is when I have been 
abroad for a long time. Then, as I sit on the top 
of an omnibus, coming in from the Marble Arch, 
that long line of Oxford Street seems a surprising 
and delightful thing, full of picturesque irregulari- 
ties, and Piccadilly Circus seems incredibly alive 
and central, and the Strand is glutted with a traffic 
typically English. I am able to remember how 
I used to turn out of the Temple and walk slowly 
towards Charing Cross, elbowing my way medita- 
tively, making up sonnets in my head while I 
missed no attractive face on the pavement or on 
the top of an omnibus, pleasantly conscious of the 
shops yet undistracted by them, happy because I 
was in the midst of people, and happier still because 
they were all unknown to me. For years that was 
my feeling about London, and now I am always 
grateful to a foreign absence which can put me 
back, if only for a day, into that comfortable frame 
of mind. Baudelaire's phrase, "a bath of multi- 
tude," seemed to have been made for me, and I 
suppose for five years or so, all the first part of 
178 



Lond 



on. 



the time when I was hving in the Temple, I never 
stayed indoors for the whole of a single evening. 
There were times when I went out as regularly as 
clockwork every night on the stroke of eleven. 
No sensation in London is so familiar to me as that 
emptiness of the Strand just before the people 
come out of the theatres, but an emptiness not 
final and absolute like that at ten o'clock; an 
emptiness, rather, in which there are the first stirrings 
of movement. The cabs shift slightly on the ranks ; 
the cabmen take the nose-bags off the horses' heads 
and climb up on their perches. There is an ex- 
pectancy all along the road : Italian waiters with 
tight greasy hair and white aprons stand less list- 
lessly at the tavern doors ; they half turn, ready 
to back into the doorway before a customer. 

As you walk along, the stir increases, cabs crawl 
out of side streets and file slowly towards the 
theatres ; the footmen cluster about the theatre- 
doors ; here and there some one comes out hurriedly 
and walks down the street. And then, all of a 
sudden, as if at some unheard signal, the wide 
doorways are blocked with slowly struggling crowds, 
you see tall black hats of men and the many coloured 
hair of women, jammed together, and slightly sway- 
ing to and fro, as if rocked from under. Black 
figures break through the crowd, and detach 
themselves against the wheels of the hansoms, a 
flying and disclosing cloak swishes against the 
shafts and is engulfed in the dark hollow; horses 
start, stagger, hammer feverishly with their hoofs 

179 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and are off; the whole roadway is black with cabs 
and carriages, and the omnibuses seem suddenly 
diminished. The pavement is blocked, the crowd 
of the doorway now sways only less helplessly upon 
the pavement ; you see the women's distracted 
and irritated eyes, their hands clutching at cloaks 
that will not come together, the absurd and anomal- 
ous glitter of diamonds and bare necks in the 
streets. 

Westward the crowd is more scattered, has more 
space t^ disperse. The Circus is like a whirlpool, 
streams pour steadily outward from the centre, 
where the fountain stands for a symbol. The 
lights glitter outside theatres and music-halls and 
restaurants ; lights coruscate, flash from the walls, 
dart from the vehicles ; a dark tangle of roofs and 
horses knots itself together and swiftly separates 
at every moment ; all the pavements are aswarm 
with people hurrying. 

In half an hour all this outflow will have sub- 
sided, and then one distinguishes the slow and 
melancholy walk of women and men, as if on some 
kind of penitential duty, round and round the 
Circus and along Piccadilly as far as the Duke of 
Wellington's house and long Regent Street almost 
to the Circus. Few walk on the left side of Picca- 
dilly or the right of Regent Street, though you 
hear foreign tongues a-chatter under the arcade. 
But the steady procession coils backward and 
forward, thickening and slackening as it rounds 
the Circus, where innocent people wait uncom- 
l8o 



London. 

fortably for omnibuses, standing close to the edge 
of the pavement. Men stand watchfully at all the 
corners, with their backs to the road ; you hear 
piping voices, shrill laughter ; you observe that 
all the women's eyes are turned sideways, never 
straight in front of them ; and that they seem 
often to hesitate, as if they were not sure of the way, 
though they have walked in that procession night 
after night, and know every stone of the pavement 
and every moulding on the brass rims of the shop- 
windows. The same faces return, lessen, the people 
come out of the restaurants and the crowd thickens 
for ten minutes, then again lessens ; and fewer 
and fewer trudge drearily along the almost deserted 
pavement. The staring lights are blotted suddenly 
from the walls ; the streets seem to grow chill, 
uninhabited, unfriendly; the few hansoms roam 
up and down restlessly, seeking a last fare. And 
still a few dingy figures creep along by the- inner 
edge of the pavement, stopping by the closed doors 
of the shops, sometimes speaking dully to one 
another; then trudging heavily along, and dis- 
appearing slowly through the side streets eastward. 
The part of London I have always known best 
is the part that lies between the Temple and Picca- 
dilly, and some of it no longer exists. When the 
Strand was widened, Holywell Street, one of the 
oldest and quaintest streets in London, was pulled 
down, Wych Street went too, and Clare Market, 
and many dingy and twisting lanes which could 
well be spared. But I deeply regret Holywell 

i8i 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Street, and when I tell strangers about it, it seems 
to me that they can never know London now. I 
suppose many people will soon forget that narrow 
lane with its overhanging wooden fronts, hke the 
houses at Coventry ; or they will remember it only 
for its surreptitious shop-windows, the glass always 
dusty, through which one dimly saw Enghsh 
translations of Zola among chemists' paraphernalia. 
The street had a bad reputation, and by night 
doors opened and shut unexpectedly up dark pass- 
ages. Perhaps that vague dubiousness added a 
little to its charm, but by day the charm was a 
positive one : the book-shops ! Perhaps I liked 
the quays at Paris even better : it was Paris, and 
there was the river, and Notre Dame, and it was 
the left bank. But nowhere else, in no other city, 
was there a corner so made for book-fanciers. 
Those dingy shops with their stalls open to the 
street, nearly all on the right, the respectable side 
as you walked west, how seldom did I keep my 
resolution to walk past them with unaverted eyes, 
how rarely did I resist their temptations. Half 
the books I possess were bought second-hand in 
Holywell Street, and what bargains I have made 
out of the fourpenny books ! On the hottest days, 
there was shade there, and excuse for lounging. 
It was a paradise for the book-lover. 

It never occurred to me that any street so old 
could seem worth pulling down; but the improve- 
ments came, and that and the less interesting streets 
near, where the Globe Theatre was (I thought it 
182 



London. 

no loss) had of course to go ; and Dane's Inn went, 
which was never a genuine "inn," but had some 
of the pleasant genuine dreariness ; and Clare 
Market was obliterated, and I believe Drury Lane 
is getting furbished up and losing its old savour 
of squalor ; and Aldwych is there, with its beautiful 
name, but itself so big and obvious that I confess, 
with my recollections of what was there before, I 
can never find my way in it. 

Striking westward, my course generally led 
me through Leicester Square. The foreign quarter 
of London radiates from Leicester Square, or winds 
inward to that point as to a centre. Its foreign 
aspect, the fact that it was the park of Soho, in- 
terested me. In Leicester Square, and in all the 
tiny streets running into it, you are never in the 
really normal London : it is an escape, a sort of 
shamefaced and sordid and yet irresistible reminder 
of Paris and Italy. The little restaurants all round 
brought me local colour before I had seen Italy; 
I still see with pleasure the straw-covered bottles 
and the strings of maccaroni in the undusted win- 
dows. The foreign people you see are not desirable 
people : what does that matter if you look on them 
as on so many puppets on a string, and their shapes 
and colours come as a relief to you after the uniform 
puppets of English make .? 

I have always been apt to look on the world as 
a puppet-show, and all the men and women merely 
players, whose wires we do not see working. There 
is a passage in one of Keats' letters which expresses 

183 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

just what I have always felt: "May there not," 
he says, "be superior beings, amused with any 
graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may 
fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of 
the stoat or the anxiety of a deer?" Is there not, 
in our aspect towards one another, something in- 
evitably automatic ? Do we see, in the larger part 
of those fellow-creatures whom our eyes rest on 
more than a smile, a gesture, a passing or a coming 
forward ? Are they more real to us than the actors 
on a stage, the quivering phantoms of a cinemato- 
graph ? With their own private existence we have 
nothing to do : do they not, so far as we are con- 
cerned, exist in part at least to be a spectacle to us, 
to convey to us a sense of life, change, beauty, 
variety, necessity ? The spectacle of human life 
is not only for the gods' eyes, but for ours ; it is 
ours in so far as we can apprehend it, and our 
pleasure and satisfaction here are largely dependent 
on the skill with which we have trained ourselves 
to that instinctive, delighted apprehension. To 
a few here and there we can come closer, we can 
make them, by some illusion of the affections, 
seem more real to us. But as for all the rest, let 
us be content to admire, to wonder, to see the use 
and beauty and curiosity of them, and intrude no 
further into their destinies. 

It was for their very obvious qualities of illusion 
that I liked to watch the people in the foreign 
quarter. They were like prisoners there, thriving 
perhaps but discontented; none of them hght- 
184 



London. 

hearted, as they would have been in their own 
country; grudgingly at home. And there was 
much piteous false show among them, soiled sordid 
ostentation, a little of what we see in the older songs 
of Yvette Guilbert. 

London was for a long time my supreme sensa- 
tion, and to roam in the streets, especially after the 
lamps were lighted, my chief pleasure. I had no 
motive in it, merely the desire to get out of doors, 
and to be among people, lights, to get out of myself. 
Myself has always been so absorbing to me that it 
was perhaps natural that, along with that habitual 
companionship, there should be at times the desire 
for escape. When I was living alone in the Temple 
that desire came over me almost every night, and 
made work, or thought without work, impossible. 
Later in the night I was often able to work with 
perfect quiet, but not unless I had been out in the 
streets first. The plunge through the Middle 
Temple gateway was like the swimmer's plunge 
into rough water: I got just that "cool shock" 
as I went outside into the brighter lights and the 
movement, I often had no idea where I was going, 
I often went nowhere. I walked, and there were 
people about me. 

I lived in Fountain Court for ten years, and 
I thought then, and think still, that it is the most 
beautiful place in London. Dutch people have 
told me that the Temple is like a little Dutch town, 
and that as they enter from Fleet Street into Middle 
Temple Lane they can fancy themselves at the 

185 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Hague. Dutchmen are happy if they have much 
that can remind them of Middle Temple Lane. 
There is a moment when you are in Fleet Street; 
you have forced your way through the long Strand, 
along those narrow pavements, in a continual coming 
and going of hurried people, with the continual 
rumble of wheels in the road, the swaying heights 
of omnibuses beside you, distracting your eyes, 
the dust, clatter, confusion, heat, bewilderment 
of that thoroughfare; and suddenly you go under 
a low doorway, where large wooden doors and a 
smaller side-door stand open, and you are suddenly 
in quiet. The roar hag dropped, as the roar of the 
sea drops if you go in at your door and shut it behind 
you. At night, when one had to knock, and so 
waited, and was admitted with a nice formality, 
it was sometimes almost startling. I have never 
felt any quiet in solitary places so much as the 
quiet of that contrast : Fleet Street and the 
Temple. 

No wheels could come nearer to me in Fountain 
Court than Middle Temple Lane, but I Hked to 
hear sometimes at night a faint clattering, only 
just audible, which I knew was the sound of a 
cab on the Embankment. The County Council, 
steadily ruining London with the persistence of 
an organic disease, is busy turning the Embank- 
ment into a gangway for electric trams ; but when 
I knew it it was a quiet, almost secluded place, 
where people sauntered and leaned over to look 
into the water, and where, at night, the policemen 
i86 



London. 

would walk with considerately averted head past 
the slumbering heaps of tired rags on the seats. 

The gates on the Embankment shut early, 
but I often came home by the river and I could 
hardly tear myself away from looking over that 
grey harsh parapet. The Neva reminds me a 
little of the Thames, though it rushes more wildly, 
and at night is more like a sea, with swift lights 
crossing it. But I do not know the river of any 
great capital which has the fascination of our river. 
Whistler has created the Thames, for most people; 
but the Thames existed before Whistler, and will 
exist after the County Council. I remember 
hearing Claude Monet say, at the time when he 
came over to the Savoy Hotel, year by year, to 
paint Waterloo Bridge from its windows, that he 
could not understand why any English painter 
ever left London. I felt almost as if the river 
belonged to the Temple : its presence there, cer- 
tainly, was part of its mysterious anomaly, a frag- 
ment of old London, walled and guarded in that 
corner of land between Fleet Street and the Thames. 

It was the name, partly, that had drawn me to 
Fountain Court, and the odd coincidence that I 
had found myself, not long before, in what was 
once Blake's Fountain Court, and then Southampton 
Buildings, now only a date on a wall. I had the 
top flat in what is really the back of one of the old 
houses in Essex Street, taken into the Temple ; 
it had a stone balcony from which I looked down 
on a wide open court, with a stone fountain in the 

187 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

middle, broad rows of stone steps leading upward 
and downward, with a splendid effect of decoration ; 
in one corner of the court was Middle Temple 
Hall, where a play of Shakespeare's was acted 
while Shakespeare was alive; all around were the 
backs of old buildings, and there were old trees, 
under which there was a bench in summer, and there 
was the glimpse of gardens going down to the 
Embankment. By day it was as legal and busy 
as any other part of the Temple, but the mental 
business of the law is not inelegantly expressed in 
those wigged and gowned figures who are generally 
to be seen crossing between the Law Courts and 
their chambers in the Temple. I felt, when I saw 
them, that I was the intruder, the modern note, 
and that they were in their place, and keeping 
up a tradition. But at night I had the place to 
myself. 

The nights in Fountain Court were a continual 
delight to me. I lived then chiefly by night, and 
when I came in late I used often to sit on the bench 
under the trees, where no one else ever sat at those 
hours. I sat there, looking at the silent water in 
the basin of the fountain, and at the leaves overhead, 
and at the sky through the leaves ; and that solitude 
was only broken by the careful policeman on guard, 
who would generally stroll up to be quite certain 
that it was the usual loiterer, who had a right to sit 
there. Sometimes he talked with me, and occasion- 
ally about books ; and once he made a surprising 
and profound criticism, for on my asking him if 
i88 



London. 

he had read Tennyson he said no, but was he not 
rather a lady-Hke writer ? 

When Verlaine stayed with me he wrote a poem 
about Fountain Court, which began truthfully: 

La Cour de la Fontaine est, dans le Temphy 
Un coin exquis de ce coin delicat 
Du Londres vieux. 

Dickens of course has written about the fountain, 
but there is only one man who could ever have 
given its due to that corner of the Temple, and he 
had other, less lovely corners to love. I say over 
everything Charles Lamb wrote about the Temple, 
and fancy it was meant for Fountain Court. 

More than once, while I was living in the 
Temple, I was visited by a strange friend of mine, 
an amateur tramp, with whom I used to wander 
about London every night in the East End, and 
about the Docks, and in all the more squalid parts 
of the city. My friend was born a wanderer, and 
I do not know what remains for him in the world 
when he has tramped over its whole surface. I 
have known him for many years, and we have 
explored many cities together, and crossed more 
than one sea, and travelled along the highroads of 
more than one country. His tramping with me 
was not very serious, but when he is alone he goes 
as a tramp among tramps, taking no money with 
him, begging his way with beggars. A little, pale, 
thin young man, quietly restless, with determined 
eyes and tight lips, a face prepared for all disguises, 

189 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

yet with a strangely personal life looking out at you, 
ambiguously enough, from underneath, he is never 
quite at home under a roof or in the company of 
ordinary people, where he seems always like one 
caught and detained unwillingly. An American, 
who has studied in a German University, brought 
up, during all his early life, in Berlin, he has always 
had a fixed distaste for the interests of those about 
him, and an instinctive passion for whatever exists 
outside the border-line which shuts us in upon 
respectability. There is a good deal of affectation 
in the literary revolt against respectability, together 
with a child's desire to shock its elders, and snatch 
a lurid reputation from those whom it professes 
to despise. My friend has never had any of this 
affectation; life is not a masquerade to him, and 
his disguises are the most serious part of his life. 
The simple fact is, that respectability, the normal 
existence of normal people, does not interest him ; 
he could not even tell you why, without searching 
consciously for reasons ; he was born with the 
soul of a vagabond, into a family of gentle, exquisitely 
refined people : he was born so, that is all. Human 
curiosity, curiosity which in most of us is sub- 
ordinate to some more definite purpose, exists in 
him for its own sake; it is his inner life, he has 
no other; his form of self-development, his form 
of culture. It seems to me that this man, who has 
seen so much of humanity, who has seen humanity 
so closely, where it has least temptation to be 
anything but itself, has really achieved culture 
190 



London. 

almost perfect of its kind, though the kind be of 
his own invention. He is not an artist, who can 
create ; he is not a thinker or a dreamer or a man of 
action ; he is a student of men and women, and of 
the outcasts among men and women, just those 
persons who are least accessible, least cared for, 
least understood, and therefore, to one like my 
friend, most alluring. He is not conscious of it, 
but I think there is a great pity at the heart of this 
devouring curiosity. It is his love of the outcast 
which makes him like to live with outcasts, not 
as a visitor in their midst, but as one of them- 
selves. 

For here is the difference between this man 
and the other adventurers who have gone abroad 
among tramps and criminals, and other misunder- 
stood or unfortunate people. Some have been 
philanthropists and have 'gone with Bibles in their 
hands ; others have been journalists, and have gone 
with note-books in their hands ; all have gone as 
visitors, as passing visitors, plunging into "the 
bath of multitude," as one might go hohday-making 
to the sea-side and plunge into the sea. But this 
man, wherever he has gone, has gone with a com- 
plete abandonment to his surroundings ; no tramp 
has ever known that "Cigarette" was not really 
a tramp ; he has begged, worked, ridden outside 
trains, slept in workhouses and gaols, not shirked 
one of the hardships of his way ; and all the time 
he has been living his own life (whatever that 
enigma may be !) more perfectly, I am sure, than 

191 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

when he is dining every day at his mother's or his 
sister's table. 

The desire of traveUing on many roads, and 
the desire of seeing many foreign faces, are almost 
always found united in that half-unconscious instinct 
which makes a man a vagabond. But I have 
never met any one in whom the actual love of the 
road is so strong as it is in my friend. In America, 
where the tramps ride over and under the trains, 
in order that they may get on the other side of a 
thousand miles without spending a lifetime about 
it, he, too, has gone by rail, not as a passenger. 
And I remember a few years ago, when we had 
given one another rendezvous at St. Petersburg, 
that I found, when I got there, that he was already 
half-way across Siberia, on the new railway which 
they were in the act of making. Also I have been 
with him to Hamburg arkd Le Havre and Antwerp 
by sea : once on an Atlantic liner, loaded with 
foreign Jews, among whom he spent most of his 
time in the steerage. But for the most part he 
walks. Wherever he walks he makes friends ; 
when we used to walk about London together he 
would stop to talk with every drunken old woman 
in Drury Lane, and get into the confidence of every 
sailor whom we came upon in the pot-houses about 
the docks. He is not fastidious, and will turn his 
hand, as the phrase is, to anything. And he goes 
through every sort of privation, endures dirt, 
accustoms himself to the society of every variety 
of his fellow-creatures without a murmur or regret. 
192 



London. 

After all, comfort is a convention, and pleasure 
an individual thing, to every individual. "To 
travel is to die continually," wrote a half-crazy 
poet who spent most of the years of a short fantastic 
life in London. Well, that is a line which I have 
often found myself repeating as I shivered in 
railway-stations on the other side of Europe, or lay 
in a plunging berth as the foam chased the snow- 
flakes off the deck. One finds, no doubt, a par- 
ticular pleasure in looking back on past discomforts, 
and I am convinced that a good deal of the attraction 
of travelling comes from an unconscious throwing 
forward of the mind to the time when the un- 
comfortable present shall have become a stirring 
memory of the past. But I am speaking now for 
those in whom a certain luxuriousness of tempera- 
ment finds itself in sharp conflict with the desire of 
movement. To my friend, I think, this is hardly 
a conceivable state of mind. He is a Stoic, as the 
true adventurer should be. Rest, even as a change, 
does not appeal to him. He thinks acutely, but 
only about facts, about the facts before him; and 
so he does not need to create an atmosphere about 
himself which change might disturb. He is fond 
of his family, his friends ; but he can do without 
them, like a man with a mission. He has no 
mission, only a great thirst ; and this thirst for the 
humanity of every nation and for the roads of every 
country drives him onward as resistlessly as the 
drunkard's thirst for drink, or the idealist's thirst 
for an ideal. 

193 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

And it seems to me that few men have reahsed, 
as this man has reahsed, that "not the fruit of 
experience, but experience itself, is the end." He 
has chosen his hfe for himself, and he has lived it, 
regardless of anything else in the world. He has 
desired strange, almost inaccessible things, and 
he has attained whatever he has desired. While 
other men have lamented their fate, wished their 
lives different, nursed vague ambitions, and dreamed 
fruitless dreams, he has quietly given up comfort 
and conventionality, not caring for them, and he 
has gone his own way without even stopping to 
think whether the way were difficult or desirable. 
Not long since, walking with a friend in the streets 
of New York, he said suddenly : " Do you know, 
I wonder what it is like to chase a man ? I know 
what it is like to be chased, but to chase a man 
would be a new sensation." The other man laughed, 
and thought no more about it. A week later my 
friend came to him with an official document : he 
had been appointed a private detective. He was 
set on the track of a famous criminal (whom, as it 
happened, he had known as a tramp) ; he made 
his plans, worked them out successfully, and the 
criminal was caught. To have done was enough : 
he had had the sensation ; he has done no more 
work as a detective. Is there not, in this curiosity 
in action, this game mastered and then cast aside, 
a wonderful promptness, sureness, a moral quality 
which is itself success in life ? 

To desire so much, and what is so human, to 
194 



London. 

make one's life out of the very fact of living it as 
one chooses ; to create a unique personal satisfaction 
out of discontent and curiosity ; to be so much 
oneself in learning so much from other people : 
is not this, in its way, an ideal, and has not my friend 
achieved it ? What I like in him so much is that 
he is a vagabond without an object. He has 
written one book, but writing has come to him as 
an accident ; and, in writing, his danger is to be 
too literal for art, and not quite literal enough for 
science. He is too completely absorbed in people 
and things to be able ever to get aloof from them ; 
and to write well of what one has done and seen 
one must be able to get aloof from oneself and from 
others. If ever a man loved wandering for its 
own sake it was George Borrow; but George 
Borrow had a serious and whimsical brain always 
at work, twisting the things that he saw into shapes 
that pleased him more than the shapes of the things 
in themselves. My friend is interested in what 
he calls sociology, but the interest is almost as 
accidental as his interest in literature or in phil- 
anthropy. He has the soul and feet of the vaga- 
bond, the passion of the roads. He is restless under 
any roof but the roof of stars. He cares passion- 
ately for men and women, not because they are 
beautiful or good or clever, or because he can do 
them good, or because they can be serviceable to 
him, but because they are men and women. And 
he cares for men and women where they are most 
vividly themselves, where they have least need for 

195 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

disguise ; for poor people, and people on the roads, 
idle people, criminals sometimes, the people who 
are so much themselves that they are no longer a 
part of society. He wanders over the whole earth, 
but he does not care for the beauty or strangeness 
of what he sees, only for the people. Writing to 
me lately from Samarcand, he said: "I have seen 
the tomb of the prophet Daniel; I have seen the 
tomb of Tamerlane." But Tamerlane was nothing 
to him, the prophet Daniel was nothing to him. 
He mentioned them only because they would 
interest me. He was trying to puzzle out and 
piece together the psychology of the Persian beggar 
whom he had left at the corner of the way. 



196 



IV. 

When my French friends come to London they 
say to me : where is your Montmartre, where is 
your Quartier Latin ? We have no Montmartre 
(not even Chelsea is that), no Quartier Latin, 
because there is no instinct in the EngHshman to 
be companionable in public. Occasions are lacking, 
it is true, for the cafe is responsible for a good part 
of the artistic Bohemianism of Paris, and we have 
no cafes. I prophesy in these pages that some day 
some one, probably an American who has come by 
way of Paris, will set back the plate-glass windows 
in many angles, which I could indicate to him, of 
the Strand, Piccadilly, and other streets, and will 
turn the whole wall into windows, and leave a space 
in front for a terrassey in the Paris manner, and we 
shall have cafes like the cafes in Paris, and the 
prestidigitateur who has done this will soon have 
made a gigantic fortune. But meanwhile let us 
recognise that there is in London no companionship 
in public (in the open air or visible through windows) 
and that nothing in Cafes Royaux and Monicos 
and the like can have the sort of meaning for young 
men in London that the cafes have long had, and 
still have, in Paris. Attempts have been made, 
and I have shared in them, and for their time they 
had their entertainment; but I have not seen one 
that flourished. 

I remember the desperate experiments of some 
to whom Paris, from a fashion, had become almost 
a necessity; and how Dowson took to cabmen's 

197 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

shelters as a sort of supper-club. Different taverns 
were at different times haunted by young writers; 
some of them came for the drink and some for the 
society; and one bold attempt was made to get 
together a cenacle in quite the French manner in 
the upper room of a famous old inn. In London 
we cannot read our poems to one another, as they 
do in Paris; we cannot even talk about our own 
works, frankly, with a natural pride, a good- 
humoured equality. They can do that in Dublin, 
and in an upper room in Dublin I find it quite 
natural. But in London even those of us who are 
least Anglo-Saxon cannot do it. Is it more, I 
wonder, a loss to us or a gain .? 

This lack of easy meeting and talking is certainly 
one of the reasons why there have been in England 
many great writers but few schools. In Paris a 
young man of twenty starts a "school" as he starts 
a "revue"; and these hasty people are in France 
often found among the people who last. In modern 
England we have gained, more than we think per- 
haps, from the accidents of neighbourhood that set 
Wordsworth and Coleridge walking and talking 
together. As it was England, and one of them 
was Wordsworth, they met in Cumberland; in 
London we have had nothing like the time of 
Victor Hugo, when Baudelaire and Gautier and 
Gerard de Nerval and men of obscure and vagabond 
genius made Paris vital, a part of themselves, a 
form of creative literature. That is what London 
has in itself the genius, the men and the material, 
198 



London. 

to be ; but of the men of our time only Henley and 
John Davidson have loved it or struck music out 
of it. 

If we had only had a Walt Whitman for London ! 
Whitman is one of the voices of the earth, and it is 
only in Whitman that the paving-stones really speak, 
with a voice as authentic as the voice of the hills. 
He knew no distinction between what is called the 
work of nature and what is the work of men. He 
left out nothing, and what still puzzles us is the 
bhnd, loving, embracing way in which he brings 
crude names and things into his vision, the name 
of a trade, a street, a territory, no matter what 
syllables it might carry along with it. He created 
a vital poetry of cities ; it was only a part of what 
he did ; but since Whitman there is no gainsaying 
it any longer. 

When I came to London, I knew nothing of 
the great things that Whitman had done, or that 
it was possible to do them in such a way; but I 
had my own feeling for London, my own point of 
view there, and I found myself gradually trying 
to paint, or to set to music, to paint in music, perhaps, 
those sensations which London awakened in me. 
I was only trying to render what I saw before me, 
what I felt, and to make my art out of living material. 
"Books made out of books pass away" was a sen- 
tence I never forgot, and my application of it was 
direct and immediate. 

I have always been curious of sensations^ and 
above all of those which seemed to lead one into 

199 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

"artificial paradises" not within everybody's reach. 
It took me some time to find out that every " artificial 
paradise" is within one's own soul, somewhere 
among one's own dreams, and that haschisch is a 
poor substitute for the imagination. The mystery 
of all the intoxicants fascinated me, and drink, 
which had no personal appeal to me, which indeed 
brought me no pleasures, found me endlessly 
observant of its powers, effects, and variations. 

Many of my friends drank, and I was forced 
to become acquainted with the different forms 
which liquor could take, so that I could almost 
label them in their classes. Thus one, whom I 
will call A., drank copiously, continually, all drinks, 
for pleasure : he could carry so much so steadily 
that he sometimes passed his limit without knowing 
it : not that he minded passing the limit, but he 
hked to be conscious of it. B. drank to become 
unconscious, he passed his limit rapidly, and became 
first apologetic, then quarrelsome. His friend C, 
a man abstract in body and mind, who muttered in 
Greek w^ien he was least conscious of himself, and 
sat with imperturbable gravity, drinking hke an 
ascetic, until his head fell without warning on the 
table, seemed to compete with B. in how to finish 
soonest with a Hfe which he had no desire to get 
rid of. I do not think he ever got any pleasure 
out of drinking : he would sit up over night with 
absinthe and cigarettes in order to be awake to 
attend early mass ; but though his will was strong 
enough for that, the habit was stronger than his 
200 



London. 

will, and he seemed like one condemned to that 
form of suicide without desire or choice in the 
matter. D. drank for pleasure, but he was scrupu- 
lous in what he drank, and would take menthe verte 
for its colour, absinthe because it lulled him with 
vague dreams, ether because it could be taken on 
strawberries. I remember his telling me exactly 
what it feels like to have delirium tremens, and he 
told it minutely, self-pityingly, but with a relish ; 
not without a melancholy artistic pride in the sensa- 
tions, their strangeness, and the fact that he should 
have been the victim. 

There were others ; there was even one who 
cured himself in some miraculous way, and could 
see his friends drink champagne at his expense, 
while he drank soda-water. All these I wondered 
at and fancied that I understood. I admit that I 
was the more interested in these men because they 
were living in the way I call artificial. I never 
thought any one the better for being a spendthrift 
of any part of his energies, but I certainly often 
found him more interesting than those who were 
not spendthrifts. 

I also found a peculiar interest in another part 
of what is artificial, properly artificial, in London. 
A city is no part of nature, and one may choose 
among the many ways in which something peculiar 
to walls and roofs and artificial lighting, is carried 
on. All commerce and all industries have their 
share in taking us further from nature and further 
from our needs, as they create about us unnatural 

20 1 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

conditions which are really what develop in us these 
new, extravagant, really needless needs. And the 
whole night-world of the stage is, in its way, a part 
of the very soul of cities. That lighted gulf, before 
which the footlights are the flaming stars between 
world and world, shows the city the passions and 
that beauty which the soul of man in cities is occupied 
in weeding out of its own fruitful and prepared soil. 
That is, the theatres are there to do so, they 
have no reason for existence if they do not do so ; 
but for the most part they do not do so. The 
English theatre with its unreal realism and its un- 
imaginative pretences towards poetry left me un- 
touched and unconvinced. I found the beauty, 
the poetry, that I wanted only in two theatres that 
were not looked upon as theatres, the Alhambra 
and the Empire. The ballet seemed to me the 
subtlest of the visible arts, and dancing a more 
significant speech than words. I could almost 
have said seriously, as Verlaine once said in jest, 
coming away from the Alhambra: "J'aime Shake- 
speare, mais . . . j'aime mieux le ballet!" Why 
is it that one can see a ballet fifty times, always 
with the same sense of pleasure, while the most 
absorbing play becomes a little tedious after the 
third time of seeing ? For one thing, because 
the difference between seeing a play and seeing a 
ballet is just the difference between reading a book 
and looking at a picture. One returns to a picture 
as one returns to nature, for a delight which, being 
purely of the senses, never tires, never distresses, 
202 



London. 

never varies. To read a book even for the first 
time, requires a certain effort. The book must 
indeed be exceptional that can be read three or 
four times, and no book was ever written that could 
be read three or four times in succession. A ballet 
is simply a picture in movement. It is a picture 
where the imitation of nature is given by nature 
itself; where the figures of the composition are 
real, and yet, by a very paradox of travesty, have 
a delightful, deliberate air of unreality. It is a 
picture where the colours change, re-combine, 
before one's eyes ; where the outlines melt into 
one another, emerge, and are again lost, in the 
kaleidoscopic movement of the dance. Here we 
need tease ourselves with no philosophies, need 
endeavour to read none of the riddles of existence ; 
may indeed give thanks to be spared for one hour 
the imbecility of human speech. After the tedium 
of the theatre, where we are called on to interest 
ourselves in the improbable fortunes of uninteresting 
people, how welcome is the relief of a spectacle 
which professes to be no more than merely beautiful ; 
which gives us, in accomplished dancing, the most 
beautiful human sight ; which provides, in short, 
the one escape into fairyland which is permitted 
by that tyranny of the real which is the worst 
tyranny of modern life. 

The most magical glimpse I ever caught of a 
ballet was from the road in front, from the other 
side of the road, one night when two doors were 
suddenly thrown open as I was passing. In the 

203 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

moment's interval before the doors closed again, I 
saw, in that odd, unexpected way, over the heads 
of the audience, far off in a sort of blue mist, the 
whole stage, its brilliant crowd drawn up in the 
last pose, just as the curtain was beginning to go 
down. It stamped itself in my brain, an impression 
caught just at the perfect moment, by some rare 
felicity of chance. But that is not an impression 
that can be repeated. For the most part I like to 
see my illusions clearly, recognising them as illu- 
sions, and so heightening their charm. I like 
to see a ballet from the wings, a spectator, but in 
the midst of the magic. To see a ballet from the 
wings is to lose all sense of proportion, all knowledge 
of the piece as a whole, but, in return, it is fruitful 
in happy accidents, in momentary points of view, 
in chance felicities of light and shade and move- 
ment. It is almost to be in the performance oneself, 
and yet passive, with the leisure to look about one. 
You see the reverse of the picture : the girls at the 
back lounging against the set scenes, turning to 
talk with some one at the side ; you see how lazily 
some of them are moving, and how mechanical and 
irregular are the motions that flow into rhythm 
when seen from the front. Now one is in the 
centre of a joking crowd, hurrying from the dressing- 
rooms to the stage ; now the same crowd returns, 
charging at full speed between the scenery, every 
one trying to reach the dressing-room stairs first. 
And there is the constant travelling of scenery, 
from which one has a series of escapes, as it bears 
204 



London. 

down unexpectedly In some new direction. The 
ballet half seen in the centre of the stage, seen in 
sections, has, in the glimpses that can be caught of 
it, a contradictory appearance of mere nature and 
of absolute unreality. And beyond the footlights, 
on the other side of the orchestra, one can see the 
boxes near the stalls, the men standing by the bar, 
an angle cut sharply off from the stalls, with the 
light full on the faces, the intent eyes, the grey 
smoke curling up from the cigarettes : a Degas, in 
short. 

And there is a charm, which I cannot think 
wholly imaginary or factitious, in that form of 
illusion which is known as make-up. To a plain 
face, it is true, make-up only intensifies plainness ; 
for make-up does but give colour and piquancy to 
what is already in a face, it adds nothing new. But 
to a face already charming, how becoming all this 
is, what a new kind of exciting savour it gives to 
that real charm ! It has, to the remnant of Puritan 
conscience or consciousness that is the heritage 
of us all, a certain sense of dangerous wickedness, 
the dehght of forbidden fruit. The very phrase, 
painted women, has come to have an association 
of sin and to have put paint on her cheeks, though 
for the innocent necessities of her profession, gives 
to a woman a kind of symbolic corruption. At 
once she seems to typify the sorceries, and entangle- 
ments of what is most deHberately enticing in her 
sex : 

Femina dulce malum, pariter favus atque venenum — 

20S 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

with all that is most subtle, least like nature, in her 
power to charm. Maquillage, to be attractive, 
must of course be unnecessary. As a disguise for 
age or misfortune, it has no interest. But, of all 
places, on the stage, and, of all people, on the 
cheeks of young people ; there, it seems to me that 
make-up is intensely fascinating, and its recognition 
is of the essence of my delight in a stage perform- 
ance. I do not for a moment want really to believe 
in what I see before me ; to believe that those wigs 
are hair, that grease-paint a blush ; any more than 
I want really to believe that the actor who has just 
crossed the stage in his everyday clothes has turned 
into an actual King when he puts on clothes that 
look like a King's clothes. I know that a delightful 
imposition is being practised upon me; that I am 
to see fairyland for a while; and to me all that 
glitters shall be gold. 

The ballet in particular, but also the whole 
surprising life of the music-halls, took hold of me 
with the charm of what was least real among the 
pompous and distressing unrealities of a great 
city. And some form I suppose of that instinct 
which has created the gladiatorial shows and the 
bull-fight made me fascinated by the faultless and 
fatal art of the acrobat, who sets his life in the 
wager, and wins the wager by sheer skill, a triumph 
of fine shades. That love of fine shades took me 
angrily past the spoken vulgarities of most music- 
hall singing (how much more priceless do they make 
the silence of dancing !) to that one great art of fine 
206 



London. 

shades, made up out of speech just lifted into song, 
which has been revealed to us by Yvette Guilbert. 
I remember when I first heard her in Paris, 
and tried vainly at the time, to get the English 
managers to bring her over to London. She sang 
"Sainte Galette," and as I listened to the song I 
felt a cold shiver run down my back, that shiver 
which no dramatic art except that of Sarah Bern- 
hardt had ever given me. It was not this that I 
was expecting to find in the thin woman with the 
long black gloves. I had heard that her songs 
were immoral, and that her manner was full of 
underhand intention. What I found was a moral 
so poignant, so human, that I could scarcely endure 
the pity of 'it, it made me feel that I was wicked, 
not that she was ; I, to have looked at these dread- 
fully serious things lightly. Later on, in London, 
I heard her sing "La Soularde," that song in which, 
as Goncourt notes in his journal, "la diseuse de 
chansonnettes se revele comme une grande, une 
tres grande actrice tragique, vous mettant au coeur 
une constriction angoisseuse." It is about an old 
drunken woman, whom the children follow and 
laugh at in the streets. Yvette imitates her old 
wagghng head, her tottering walk, her broken 
voice, her little sudden furies, her miserable resigna- 
tion ; she suggests all this, almost without moving, 
by the subtlest pantomime, the subtlest inflections 
of voice and face, and she thrills you with the 
grotesque pathos of the whole situation, with the 
intense humanity of it. I imagine such a situation 

207 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

rendered by an English music-hall singer ! Imagine 
the vulgarity, the inhumanity, of the sort of beery 
caricature that we should get, in place of this 
absolutely classic study in the darker and more 
sordid side of life. The art of Yvette Guilbert 
is always classic; it has restraint, form, dignity, 
in its wildest licence. Its secret is its expressive- 
ness, and the secret of that expressiveness lies 
perhaps largely in its attention to detail. Others 
are content with making an effect, say twice, in the 
course of a song. Yvette Guilbert insists on getting 
the full meaning out of every line, but quietly, 
without emphasis, as if in passing; and, with her, 
to grasp a meaning is to gain an effect. 

There was the one great artist of that world 
which, before I could apprehend it, had to be 
reflected back to me as in some bewildering mirror. 
It was out of mere curiosity that I had found my 
way into that world, into that mirror, but, once 
there, the thing became material for me. I tried 
to do in verse something of what Degas had done 
in painting. I was conscious of transgressing no 
law of art in taking that scarcely touched material 
for new uses. Here, at least, was a decor which 
appealed to me, and which seemed to me full of 
strangeness, beauty, and significance. I still think 
that there is a poetry in this world of illusion, not 
less genuine of its kind than that more easily appre- 
hended poetry of a world, so little more real, that 
poets have mostly turned to. It is part of the 
poetry of cities, and it waits for us in London. 
208 



V. 

A CITY is characterised by its lights, and it is to its 
lights, acting on its continual mist, that London 
owes much of the mystery of its beauty. On a 
winter afternoon every street in London becomes 
mysterious. You see even the shops through a 
veil, people are no longer distinguishable as persons, 
but are a nimble flock of shadows. Lights travel 
and dance through alleys that seem to end in dark- 
ness. Every row of gas lamps turns to a trail of 
fire; fiery stars shoot and flicker in the night. 
Night becomes palpable, and not only an absence 
of the light of day. 

The most beautiful lighting of a city is the 
lighting of one street in Rome by low-swung 
globes of gas that hang like oranges down the Via 
Nazionale, midway between the houses. In London 
we light casually, capriciously, every one at his 
own will, and so there are blinding shafts at one 
step and a pit of darkness at the next, and it is an 
adventure to follow the lights in any direction, the 
lights are all significant and mean some place of 
entertainment or the ambition of some shopkeeper. 
They draw one by the mere curiosity to find out 
why they are there, what has set them signalling. 
And, as you walk beyond or aside from the shops, 
all these private illuminations are blotted out, and 
the dim, sufficing street-gas of the lamp-posts takes 
their place. 

The canals, in London, have a mysterious 
quality, made up of sordid and beautiful elements, 

209 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

now a black trail, horrible, crawling secretly; now 
a sudden opening, as at Maida Vale, between dull 
houses, upon the sky. At twilight in winter the 
canal smokes and flares, a long line of water with 
its double row of lamps, dividing the land. From 
where Browning lived for so many years there is 
an aspect which might well have reminded him of 
Venice. The canal parts, and goes two ways, 
broadening to almost a lagoon, where trees droop 
over the water from a kind of island, with rocky 
houses perched on it. You see the curve of a 
bridge, formed by the shadow into a pure circle, 
and lighted by the reflection of a gas lamp in the 
water beyond ; and the dim road opposite following 
the line of the canal, might be a calle ; only the long 
hull of a barge lying there is not Venetian in shape, 
and, decidedly, the atmosphere is not Venetian. 
Verlaine, not knowing, I think, that Browning lived 
there, made a poem about the canal, which he dated 
"Paddington." It is one of his two "Streets," 
and it begins: "O la riviere dans la rue," and 
goes on to invoke "I'eau jaune comme une morte," 
with nothing to reflect but the fog. The barges 
crawl past with inexpressible slowness ; coming 
out slowly after the horse and the rope from under 
the bridge, with a woman leaning motionless against 
the helm, and drifting on as if they were not moving 
at all. 

On the river the lights are always at work 
building fairy-palaces ; wherever there are trees 
they wink like stars through drifting cloud, and 

2IO 



London. 

the trees become oddly alive, with a more restless 
life than their life by day. I have seen a plain 
churchyard with its straight grave-stones turn on 
a winter afternoon into a sea of white rocks, with 
vague rosy shore Hghts beyond. But it is the 
fog which lends itself to the supreme London 
decoration, collaborating with gaslight through 
countless transformations, from the white shroud 
to the yellow blanket, until every gas lamp is out, 
and you cannot see a torch a yard beyond your 
feet. 

There is nothing in the world quite like a London 
fog, though the underground railway stations in 
the days of steam might have prepared us for it 
and Dante has described it in the "Inferno" when 
he speaks of the banks of a pit in hell, "crusted 
over with a mould from the vapour below, which 
cakes upon them, and battles with eye and nose." 
Foreigners praise it as the one thing in which 
London is unique. They come to London to 
experience it. It is as if one tried the experience 
of drowning or suffocating. It is a penalty worse 
than any Chinese penalty. It stifles the mind as 
well as choking the body. It comes on slowly 
and stealthily, picking its way, choosing its direc- 
tion, leaving contemptuous gaps in its course ; 
then it settles down like a blanket of solid smoke, 
which you can feel but not put from you. The 
streets turn putrescent, the gas lamps hang like 
rotting fruit, you are in a dark tunnel, in which 
the lights are going out, and beside you, unseen, 

211 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

there is a roar and rumble, interrupted with sharp 
cries, a stopping of wheels and a beginning of the 
roar and rumble over again. You walk like a 
blind man, fumbhng with his staff at the edge 
of the pavement. Familiar turnings, which you 
fancied you could follow blindfold, deceive you, 
and you are helpless if you go two yards out of your 
course. The grime blackens your face, your eyes 
smart, your throat is as if choked with dust. You 
breathe black foulness and it enters into you and 
contaminates you. 

And yet, how strange, inexplicable, mysteriously 
impressive is this masque of shadows ! It is the 
one wholly complete transformation of the visible 
world, the one darkness which is really visible, 
the one creation of at least the beauty of horror 
which has been made by dirt, smoke, and cities. 

Yet the eternal smoke of London lies in wait 
for us, not only in the pestilence of chimneys, but 
rising violently out of the earth, in a rhetoric of its 
own. There are in London certain gaps or holes 
in the earth, which are like vent-holes, and out of 
these openings its inner ferment comes for a moment 
to the surface. One of them is at Chalk Farm 
Station. There is a gaunt cavernous doorway 
leading underground, and this doorway faces three 
roads from the edge of a bridge. The bridge 
crosses an abyss of steam, which rises out of depths 
like the depths of a boiling pot, only it is a witches* 
pot of noise and fire; and pillars and pyramids 
of smoke rise continually out of it, and there are 

212 



London. 

hoarse cries, screams, a clashing and rattHng, the 
sound as of a movement which struggles and cannot 
escape, like the coiling of serpents twisting together 
in a pit. Their breath rises in clouds, and drifts 
voluminously over the gap of the abyss ; catching 
at times a ghastly colour from the lamplight. Some- 
times one of the snakes seems to rise and sway out 
of the tangle, a column of yellow blackness. Multi- 
tudes of red and yellow eyes speckle the vague 
and smoky darkness, out of which rise domes and 
roofs and chimneys ; and a few astonished trees 
lean over the mouth of the pit, sucking up draughts 
of smoke for air. 



213 



VI. 

Is there any city in which life and the conditions 
of life can be more abject than. in London, any city 
in which the poor are more naturally unhappy 
and less able to shake off or come through their 
poverty into any natural relief? Those sordid 
splendours of smoke and dirt which may be so fine 
as aspects, mean something which we can only 
express by the English word squalor; they mean 
the dishumanising of innumerable people who 
have no less right than ourselves to exist naturally. 
I will take one road, which I know well, and which 
every one who lives in London must know some- 
what, for it is a main artery, Edgware Road, as a 
parable of what I mean. Nowhere in London is 
there more material for a comparative study in 
living. 

Edgware Road begins proudly in the West 
End of London, sweeping off in an emphatic 
curve from the railings of Hyde Park, beyond the 
Marble Arch; it grows meaner before Chapel 
Street, and from Chapel Street to the flower-shanty 
by the canal, where Maida Vale goes down hill, 
it seems to concentrate into itself all the sordidness 
of London. Walking outward from Chapel Street, 
on the right-hand side of the road, you plunge 
instantly into a dense, parching, and enveloping 
smell, made up of stale fish, rotting vegetables, 
and the must of old clothes. The pavement is 
never clean; bits of torn paper, fragments of 
cabbage leaves, the rind of fruit, the stalks of 
214 



London. 

flowers, the litter swept away from the front of shops 
and Hngering on its way to the gutter, drift to and 
fro under one's feet, moist with rain or greased 
with mud. As one steps out of the way of a shmy 
greyness on the ground, one brushes against a 
coat on which the dirt has caked or a skirt which 
it streaks damply. Women in shawls, with untidy 
hair, turn down into the road from all the side 
streets, and go in and out of the shops. They 
carry baskets, bags, and parcels wrapped in news- 
papers ; grease oozes through the paper, smearing 
it with printer's ink as it melts. They push per- 
ambulators in front of them, in which children with 
smeared faces pitch and roll ; they carry babies 
under their shawls. Men with unshaven faces, 
holding short clay pipes between their teeth, walk 
shamblingly at their side; the men's clothes are 
discoloured with time and weather, and hang 
loosely about them, as if they had been bought 
ready-made ; they have dirty scarves knotted round 
their necks, and they go along without speaking. 
Men with thread-bare frock coats, ill-fitting and 
carefully brushed, pass nervously, with white faces 
and thin fingers. Heavy men with whips in their 
hands, thin, clean-shaven men in short coats and 
riding gaiters, lounge in front of the horse-dealer's 
across the road, or outside dusty shops with bundles 
of hay and sacks of bran in their doorways. 

Here and there a gaudy sheet slung across a 
window announces a fat woman on show, or a 
collection of waxworks with the latest murder; 

215 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

flags and streamers, daubed with ragged lettering, 
hang out from the upper windows. At intervals, 
along the pavement, there are girls offering big 
bunches of v/hite and yellow flowers ; up the side 
streets there are barrows of plants and ferns and 
flowers in pots ; and the very odour of the flowers 
turns sickly, as the infection of the air sucks it up 
and mingles it with the breath and sweat of the 
people and the ancient reek of clothes that have 
grown old upon unwashed bodies. 

Sometimes a pavement artist brings his pictures 
with him on a square canvas, and ties a string in 
front of them, propping them against the wall, and 
sits on the ground at one end, with his cap in his 
hand. At regular intervals a Punch and Judy 
comes to one of the side streets, just in from the 
road, a little melancholy white dog with a red ruff^ 
about its neck barks feebly as the puppets flap their 
noses in its face. On Sundays the Salvation Army 
holds meetings, with flags flying and loud brass 
instruments playing; the red caps and black sun- 
bonnets can be seen in the hollow midst of the 
crowd. Not far ofi^, men dressed in surplices 
stand beside a harmonium, with prayer-books in 
their hands; a few people listen to them half- 
heartedly. There are generally one or two Italian 
women, with bright green birds in their cages, 
huddled in the corner of doorways and arches, 
waiting to tell fortunes. A blind beggar in a tall 
hat stands at the edge of the curbstone; he has 
a tray of matches and boot-laces to sell ; he holds 
216 



London. 

a stick in his hand, with which he paws nervously 
at an inch of pavement ; his heel seeks the gutter, 
and feels its way up and down from gutter to 
pavement. 

Somewhere along the road there is generally 
a little crowd ; a horse has fallen, or a woman has 
lost a penny in the mud, or a policeman, note-book 
in hand, is talking to a cab-driver who has upset 
a bicycle. Two women are quarrelling; they 
tear at the handle of a perambulator in which two 
babies sit and smile cheerfully. Two men grapple 
with each other in the middle of the road, almost 
under the horses of the omnibus ; the driver stops 
his horses, so as not to run them down. A coarse, 
red-faced woman of fifty drags an old woman by 
the arm ; she is almost too old to walk, and she 
totters and spreads out her arms helplessly as the 
other pulls at her; her head turns on her shoulder, 
looking out blindly, the mouth falling open in a 
convulsive grimace, the whole face eaten away 
with some obscure suffering which she is almost 
past feeling. A barrel-organ plays violently; some 
youths stare at the picture of the fat, half-naked 
lady on the front of the instrument ; one or two 
children hold out their skirts in both hands and 
begin to dance to the tune. 

On Saturday night the Road is lined with stalls ; 
naphtha flames burn over every stall, flaring away 
from the wind, and lighting up the faces that lean 
towards them from the crowd on the pavement. 
There are stalls with plants, cheap jewelry, paper 

217 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

books, scarves and braces, sweets, bananas, ice- 
cream barrows, weighing-machines ; long rows of 
rabbits hang by their trussed hind legs, and a boy 
skins them rapidly with a pen-knife for the buyers ; 
raw lumps of meat redden and whiten as the light 
drifts over and away from them; the salesmen 
cry their wares. The shops blaze with light, dis- 
playing their cheap clothes and cheap furniture 
and clusters of cheap boots. Some of the women 
are doing their Saturday night's shopping, but for 
the most part it is a holiday night, and the people 
swarm in the streets, some in their working clothes, 
some in the finery which they will put on to-morrow 
for their Sunday afternoon walk in the Park; in 
their faces, their movements, there is that un- 
enjoying hilarity which the end of the week's work, 
the night, the week's wages, the sort of street fair 
at which one can buy things to eat and to put on, 
bring out in people who seem to live for the most 
part with preoccupied indifference. 

As I walk to and fro in Edgware Road, I cannot 
help sometimes wondering why these people exist, 
why they take the trouble to go on existing. Watch 
their faces, and you will see in them a listlessness, 
a hard unconcern, a failure to be interested, which 
speaks equally in the roving eyes of the man who 
stands smoking at the curbstone with his hands in 
his pockets, and in the puckered cheeks of the 
woman doing her shopping, and in the noisy laugh 
of the youth leaning against the wall, and in the 
grey, narrow face of the child whose thin legs are 
218 



London. 

too tired to dance when the barrel-organ plays jigs. 
Whenever anything happens in the streets there is 
a crowd at once, and this crowd is made up of 
people who have no pleasures and no interests of 
their own to attend to, and to whom any variety 
is welcome in the tedium of their lives. In all 
these faces you will see no beauty, and you will 
see no beauty in the clothes they wear, or in their 
attitudes in rest or movement, or in their voices 
when they speak. They are human beings to whom 
nature has given no grace or charm, whom life has 
made vulgar, and for whom circumstances have 
left no escape from themselves. In the climate 
of England, in the atmosphere of London, on these 
pavements of Edgware Road, there is no way of 
getting any simple happiness out of natural things, 
and they have lost the capacity for accepting natural 
pleasures graciously, if such came to them. Crawl- 
ing between heaven and earth thus miserably, they 
have never known what makes existence a practicable 
art or a tolerable spectacle, and they have infinitely 
less sense of the mere abstract human significance 
of life than the facchino who lies, a long blue streak 
in the sun, on the Zattere at Venice, or the girl 
who carries water from the well in an earthen pitcher, 
balancing it on her head, in any Spanish street. 

Or, instead of turning to human beings, in some 
more favourable part of the world, go to the Zoo- 
logical Gardens and look at the beasts there. The 
conditions of existence are, perhaps, slightly worse 
for the beasts ; their cages are narrow, more securely 

219 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

barred; human curiosity is brought to bear upon 
them with a more pubHc offence. But observe, 
under all these conditions, the dignity of the beasts, 
their disdain, their indifference ! When the flutter- 
ing beribboned, chattering human herd troops past 
them, pointing at them with shrill laughter, uneasy, 
preoccupied, one eye on the beasts and the other 
on the neighbour's face or frock, they sit there 
stolidly in their cages, not condescending to notice 
their unruly critics. When they move, they move 
with the grace of natural things, made rhythmical 
with beauty and strong for ravage and swift for 
flight. They pace to and fro, rubbing themselves 
against the bars, restlessly; but they seem all on 
fire with a life that tingles to the roots of their claws 
and to the tips of their tails, dilating their nostrils 
and quivering in little shudders down their smooth 
flanks. They have found an enemy craftier than 
they, they have been conquered and carried away 
captive, and they are full of smouldering rage. 
But with the loss of liberty they have lost nothing 
of themselves ; the soul of their flesh is uncon- 
taminated by humiliation. They pass a mournful 
existence nobly, each after his kind, in loneliness 
or in unwilling companionship ; their eyes look 
past us without seeing us ; we have no power over 
their concentration within the muscles of their 
vivid limbs or within the coils of their subtle bodies. 
Humanity, at the best, has much to be ashamed 
of, physically, beside the supreme physical perfection 
of the panther or the snake. All of us look poor 
220 



London. 

enough creatures as we come away from their cages. 
But think now of these men and women whom we 
have seen swarming in Edgware Road, of their 
vulgarity, their abjectness of attitude toward hfe, 
their ugHness, dirt, insolence, their loud laughter. 
All the animals except man have too much dignity 
to laugh ; only man found out the way to escape 
the direct force of things by attaching a critical 
sense, or a sense of relief, to a sound which is neither 
a cackle nor a whinny, but which has something 
of those two inarticulate voices of nature. As I 
passed through the Saturday night crowd lately, 
between two opposing currents of evil smells, I 
overheard a man who was lurching along the 
pavement say in contemptuous comment : "Twelve 
o'clock ! we may be all dead by twelve o'clock ! " 
He seemed to sum up the philosophy of that crowd, 
its listlessness, its hard unconcern, its failure to be 
interested. Nothing matters, he seemed to say 
for them ; let us drag out our time until the time 
is over, and the sooner it is over the better. 

Life in great cities dishumanises humanity; 
it envelops the rich in multitudes of clogging, 
costly trifles, and cakes the poor about with ignoble 
dirt and the cares of unfruitful labour. Go into 
the country, where progress and machines and 
other gifts of the twentieth century have not wholly 
taken away the peasant's hand from the spade and 
plough, or to any fishing village on the coast, and 
you will see that poverty, even in England, can 
find some natural delights in natural things. You 

221 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

will find, often enough, that very English quaHty 
of vulgarity in the peasant who lives inland ; only 
the sea seems to cleanse vulgarity out of the English 
peasant, and to brace him into a really simple and 
refined dignity. And, after all, though the labourer 
who turns the soil is in unceasing contact with 
nature, he has not that sting of danger to waken 
him and cultivate his senses which is never absent 
for long from the life of the fisherman. People who 
cast their nets into the sea, on the hazard of that 
more uncertain harvest, have a gravity, a finished 
self-reliance, a kind of philosophy of their own. 
Their eyes and hands are trained to fineness and 
strength, they learn to know the winds and clouds, 
and they measure their wits against them, risking 
their lives on the surety of their calculations. The 
constant neighbourhood of death gives life a keener 
savour, they have no certainty of ever opening 
again the door which they close behind them as 
they go out to launch their boats under the stars. 
Tossing between a naked sea and a naked sky all 
night long, they have leisure for many dreams, and 
thoughts come into their heads which never trouble 
the people who live in streets. They have all the 
visible horizon for their own. 

And the sea washes clean. In the steep Cornish 
village that I know best, I see, whenever I go out, 
bright flowers in front of white cottages, a cow's 
head laid quietly over a stone hedge, looking down 
on the road, the brown harvest in the fields that 
stretch away beyond the trees to the edge of the 

222 



London. 

clifF, and then, further on towards the sky, the blue 
ghtter of the sea, shining under sunhght, with great 
hills and palaces of white clouds, rising up from 
the water as from a solid foundation. The sea is 
always at the road's end, and there is always a wind 
from the sea, coming singing up the long street 
from the harbour, and shouting across the fields 
and whistling in the lanes. Life itself seems to 
come freshly into one's blood, as if life were not 
only a going on with one's habits and occupations, 
but itself meant something, actually existed. Every 
one I meet on the road speaks to me as I pass ; 
their faces and their voices are cheerful ; they have 
no curiosity, but they are ready to welcome a stranger 
as if he were some one they knew already. Time 
seems to pass easily, in each day's space between 
sea and sky ; the day has no tedium for them ; 
and they need go no further than to the harbour 
or the farm for enough interest to fill out all the 
hours of the day. They have room to live, air to 
breathe ; beauty is natural to everything about 
them. The dates in their churchyards tell you 
how long they have the patience to go on living. 

1908. 



223 



III. 

Sea-Coasts and Islands. 



Dieppe, 1895. 



I. 

I WENT to Dieppe this summer with the intention 
of staying from Saturday to Monday. Two months 
afterwards I began to wonder, with a very mild 
kind of surprise, why I had not yet returned to 
London. And I was not the only one to fall under 
this inexplicable fascination. There is a fantastical 
quality in Dieppe air which somehow turns us all, 
at our moments, into amiable and enthusiastic 
lunatics. Relays of friends kept arriving, I as little 
as they knew why ; and some of them, like myself, 
never went back. Others, forced to live mostly 
in London, and for the most part content to live 
there, went backwards and forwards every week. 
What is it, in this little French watering-place, that 
appeals so to the not quite conventional English- 
man, brings him to it, holds him in it, brings him 
back to it so inevitably? Nothing and everything; 
an impalpable charm, the old-fashioned distinction 
of a little town which has still, in its faded lawns 
by the sea, in the line of white hotels beyond the 
lawns, something of that 1830 air which exhales 
for us from a picture of Bonington. And then 
Dieppe is so discreetly, and with such self-respect, 
hospitable to us English ; so different from the 
vulgar friendliness of Boulogne, with its "English 
chop-houses" insulting one's taste at every step. 
Dieppe receives us with perfectly French manners, 
offers us politeness, and exacts it on our part, and 
pleases a sensitive and appreciative Englishman 

227 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

because it is so charming in such a French way. 
And then hfe, if you will but abandon yourself to 
the natural current of things, passes in a dream. 
I do not quite know why, but one cannot take things 
seriously at Dieppe. Only just on the other side 
of that blue streak is England : England means 
London. At the other end of a short railway-line 
is Paris. But all that is merely so many words ; 
the mind refuses to grasp it as a fact. One's duties, 
probably, call one to London or Paris, one's realisable 
pleasures ; everything but the moment's vague 
immense, I say again, inexplicable, satisfaction, 
which broods and dawdles about Dieppe. 

At Dieppe the sea is liberal, and affords you a 
long sweep from the cliffs on the left to the pier on 
the right. A few villas nestle under the cliffs ; 
then comes the Casino, which takes its slice of the 
plage with excellent judgment. Built of peppermint- 
coloured brick, it sprawls its length insolently above 
the sea. It is quite nice, as casinos go ; it is roomy, 
and has some amusing chandeliers hung up by 
ribbons ; and the terrace is absolutely charming. 
If you are insular enough to wish it, you can sit and 
drink brandies and sodas all day ; if you would do 
in France as the French do, you can sit nearer the 
parapet, with an awning stretched above your head, 
and look out drowsily over the sea, which is worth 
looking at here, opalescent, full of soft change. 
You will see around you beautiful, well-dressed 
women, princes, painters, poets, Cleo de Merode. 
All around you, bright in the bright sun, there is 
228 



Dieppe, 1895. 

a flow of soft dresses, mostly in sharp, clear colours, 
vivid yellows and blues and whites, the most wonder- 
ful blues, more dazzling than the sea. And there 
are delicious hats, floating over the hair like clouds; 
great floating sleeves, adding wings to the butter- 
fly; all the fashions and felicities of a whole 
summer. 

Ah ! but the plage, on a sunny morning in mid- 
season, what a feast of colour, of movement, of the 
most various curiosities ! The plage has its social 
laws, its social divisions, an etiquette almost as 
scrupulous as a drawing-room. All the space in 
front of the Casino is tacitly reserved for the people 
who subscribe to the Casino, and who are moving 
up and down the wooden staircase from the terrace 
to the beach all day long. Beyond that limit the 
plage is plebeian, and belongs to everybody. Women 
sit about there with shawls and babies and paper 
parcels. Outside the Casino there are fewer people, 
but one is more or less smart, and the barons and 
beautes de plage are alike here. In front of the 
double row of bathing-machines there is a line of 
little private boxes. Smart women sit on exhibition 
in every compartment, wearing their best hats and 
smiles, sometimes pretending to read or sew, as if 
one did anything but sit on exhibition, and flirt, 
and chatter, and look at the bathers ! There is 
a constant promenade along the shifting and re- 
sounding pathway of boards laid over the great 
pebbles ; chairs are grouped closely all along the 
plage between this promenade and the sea ; there 

229 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

is another little crowd on the estacade, from which 
the bathers are diving. The bright dresses gUtter 
in the sunhght, Hke a flower garden ; white peignoirs, 
bright and dark bathing costumes, the white and 
rose of bare and streaming flesh, passing to and fro, 
hurriedly, between the bathing-machines and the 
sea. The men, if they have good figures, look 
well; they have at least the chance of looking 
well. But the women ! Rare, indeed, is the 
woman who can look pretty, in her toilette or her- 
self, as she comes out of the sea, wraps herself in 
a sort of white nightgown, and staggers up the 
beach, the water running down her legs. Even 
at the more elegant moment when she drops her 
peignoir at the sea's edge, before stepping in, it is 
hard for her to look her best. Is it not with a finer 
taste, after all, that in some parts of England the 
women are not allowed to bathe with the men, are 
kept out of sight as much as possible ? A senti- 
mental sensualist should avoid the French seaside. 
He will be pained at seeing how ridiculous a beauti- 
ful woman may look when she is clothed in wet 
and dragging garments. The lines of the body are 
lost or deformed ; there is none of the suggestion 
of ordinary costume, only a grotesque and shapeless 
image, all in pits and protuberances for which 
Nature should be ashamed to accept responsibility. 
Between nakedness and this compromise with 
clothes there is the whole world's length ; and as 
for this state of being undressed and yet covered, 
in this makeshift, unmilliner-hke way, it is too 
230 



Dieppe, 1895. 

barbarous, Mesdames, for the tolerance of any 
gentleman of taste. 

II. 

The Casino has many charms. You can dance 
there, listen to music, walk or sit on the terrace in 
the sun, write your letters in the reading-room on 
the very pictorial paper which is so carefully doled 
out to you ; but it is for none of these things that 
the Casino exists, it is in none of these things that 
there lies the unique fascination of the Casino, for 
those to whom the Casino has a unique fascination. 
The Casino, properly speaking, is only a gorgeous 
stable for the little horses. All the rooms in the 
Casino open into the room of the green tables ; 
all the alleys of the gardens lead there. In the 
intervals of the concert, if you wish to stroll for a 
few minutes on the terrace, you have to pass through 
the room ; you see the avid circle about the tables, 
hear the swish of the horses, the monotonous 
"Faites vos jeux. Messieurs. . . . Les jeux sont 
faits. . . . Rien ne va plus," and then, after the 
expectant pause, the number: "L'as, numero 
un." And in time, however strong, or however 
idle, or however indifferent you are, you will be 
drawn into that fascinated circle, you will be seized 
by the irresistible impulse, you will begin to play. 
The fascination of gambling, to the real amateur 
of the thing, is stronger than any other passion. 
Men forget that a beautiful woman is sitting opposite 

231 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

to them; women do not so much as notice that a 
more beautiful toilette than their own has just come 
into the room. I have seen the most famous pro- 
fessional beauties of Paris sit at those green tables, 
and not a soul has looked at them except the croupiers 
and myself. 

I said the impulse was irresistible. I have proved 
it on myself. Gambling in the abstract has no 
charms for me; I can go to the races without the 
slightest inclination to take the odds ; it annoys 
me when little newspaper boys rush up to me as 
if expecting me to buy their papers because they are 
the first to shout "All the win-ner!" I lounged 
about the room of the Petits Chevaux for weeks 
without putting on more than two or three two- 
franc pieces, which I contentedly lost. I saw my 
friends winning and losing every afternoon and 
every evening; I saw them leaving the tables with 
their pockets bulging with five-franc pieces ; I 
heard them discussing lucky numbers ; I saw the 
strength of the passion which held them by the 
urgency and the futility of their remorse when they 
had lost; I heard them saying to me, "It will be 
your turn next," and I laughed, certain of myself. 
At last a woman, with a malicious confidence, 
tempted me. I put on a few francs to please her, 
and I found myself waiting with more interest for 
the turn of her head than for the gesture of the little 
horse who passed the winning post first. I knew 
by that that the demon of play had not bitten me ; 
I felt absolutely safe. 
232 



Dieppe, 1895. 

Well, of course, I succumbed, and the sensation 
I experienced was worth the price I paid for it. 
While I played nothing existed but the play; the 
money slipped through my fingers, I gathered it 
in, flung it forth, with an absorption so complete 
that my actions were almost mechanical. My 
brain seemed to act with instantaneous energy; 
no sooner had I willed than my fingers were placing 
the coins here, and not there, I knew not why, 
on the table. I followed no system, and I never 
hesitated. I then knew for the first time the strength 
of conviction for which there is not even the pretence 
of a foundation. While my money lasted, and I 
saw it flowing to me and from me so capriciously, I 
felt what I think must have been the intoxication 
of abandoning oneself to Fate, with an astonishing 
sense of superiority over ordinary mortals, from 
whom I was almost more absolutely removed than 
if I had been moving in a haschisch dream. And 
in the exaltation, the absorption of this dream, 
in which I was acting with such reckless and cause- 
less certainty, there was no really disillusioning 
shock, either when I lost or when I won. My 
excitement was so great that I accepted these 
accidents as merely points in a progress. After 
a time I did not even play for the sake of winning. 
I played for the sake of playing. 

After all, Petits Chevaux is the merest amateur 
gambling; the serious people who play baccarat 
next door, in the club, would laugh at it, and 
rightly, from the gambler's point of view. The 

233 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

interest of the thing is in its revelation of the universal 
humanity of the gambling instinct, which comes 
out so certainly and so unexpectedly in the people 
who gamble once in the year, for a few scores or a 
few hundreds of francs. And those green tables 
are so admirable in the view they aflFord of the little 
superstitions which exist somewhere in the back- 
ground of all minds. This table is lucky to such a 
person, that column to another. The women swear 
by the croupiers, and will take any amount of trouble 
to get a seat by the side of the one they prefer. 
And the croupiers, little miserable engines of Fate, 
sit with folded hands and intent eyes, impassive, 
supercilious, like little Eastern gods, raking in the 
money without satisfaction, and tossing you your 
winnings with an air of disdain. Yet they, too, 
in spite of their air of supremacy, are entirely at 
the mercy of a moment's caprice. They may be 
dismissed if you win too much at their table ; and 
here is the most imposing of all the croupiers offering 
himself and his wife, as servants, to a lady who 
played there. 

III. 

On certain afternoons there is a Bat des Enfants 
at the Casino. You cannot imagine anything more 
delicious. All around the room sit children, in 
their white dresses, their little, thin black and 
yellow legs set forth gravely. They are preoccupied 
with their fans, their sashes, their gloves ; their 
234 



Dieppe, 1895. 

hair is beautifully done all over their heads, and 
falls down their backs. The little boys, in velvet 
and navy suits, march to and fro, very solemnly, 
a little awkwardly, bow, and choose partners. The 
bigger girls (some of them are thirteen or fourteen) 
jump up, cross the room hurriedly, with the nervous 
movement of young girls walking, tossing their 
hair back from their shoulders ; they form little 
groups, laugh and nod to the grown-up people 
who stand about the door; and every now and 
then pounce on a tiny sister, and pull about her 
dress until its set suits them. In the middle of 
the room stand two absurd persons ; the blond 
Jew with the immense pink nose, the golden beard 
and moustaches, who acts as master of the cere- 
monies : he tries to assume a paternal air, his swollen 
eyes dart about nervously; and the middle-aged 
lady with the eyeglasses, who is more immediately 
concerned with the children's conduct. She is 
frankly anxious, fussy, and occupied. The or- 
chestra is about to begin, and in the middle of the 
room a little helpless ring of very tiny children, 
infants, begins to walk gravely round and round ; 
the tiny people hold one another's hands, wonder- 
ingly, and toddle along with their heads looking 
over their shoulders, all in opposite directions. 
The dance has begun : it is the Moska, with its 
funny rhythm, its double stamp of the heels. Some 
of the children dance charmingly, with a pretty 
exactness in the trip and turn of the toes, the fling 
of the leg. There are adorable frocks, marvellous 

235 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

faces. They turn, turn, stop short, stamp their 
heels, and turn again. The whole thing is so gay 
and simple and artificial, these little, got-up people 
who are playing at being their elders ; it is so pretty 
altogether and so exciting, that I could watch it 
for hours. Nothing is more exciting than to see 
children masquerading. I am always disposed to 
take them, as they would be taken, very seriously, 
to think of them almost as of men and women. 
As if they were' not so far more attractive than any 
possible men and women ! I hate to think of all 
that floating hair being twisted up into coils and 
bundled together obscurely at the back of the head. 
I can see the elder sisters of these enchanting little 
absurdities standing beside me at the door. How 
uninteresting they are, how little they invite the 
wandering of even the vaguest emotion ! 

IV. 

But all Dieppe is not to be seen at the Casino, 
and, perhaps, not the most intimate part of Dieppe. 
I had the good fortune to live in the very heart 
of the town, just outside the principal doorway of 
the Eglise Saint- Jacques. I have never in my life 
had a more genuine and, in its way, profound 
sensation than my daily and nightly view of that 
adorable old church, a somewhat flamboyant Gothic, 
certainly, which I grew to love and wonder at with 
an intimacy that was entirely new to me. To 
look out last thing at night, before getting into bed, 
236 



Dieppe, 1895. 

and see the grey stone flowering there before me, 
rising up into the stars as if at home there, and so 
full of solid shadow about its base, broadly planted 
on the solid earth ; to rise in the morning and look 
out on the same grey mass, white in parts, and 
warm in the early sunlight ; there never was a 
decor which pleased me so much, which put so many 
dreams into my head. Every Gothic church is a 
nest of dreams, and the least religiously minded 
of men has his moments of devotion, of spiritual 
exaltation before so delicate and so enduring a 
work of men's hands in praise of God. Sight and 
thought are lost in it ; one feels its immensity as 
one feels the immensity of the sea. And it was 
as dear to me as the sea itself, this church of the 
patron saint of fishermen, who leans upon his 
staff, a sensual Jewish person with fleshy lips and 
a smile which is somewhat sneering in the arch of 
the doorway. 

During the first part of my stay, the fineness, 
the supremacy, the air of eternity of the church were 
curiously accentuated by a little fair, horrid, an 
oppression, a nightmare, which installed itself at 
the church's very base, in every corner of the many- 
cornered ground about it. All day long, into the 
late evening, the wooden horses went swaying 
round to the noise of two or three tunes ; a trans- 
formation show of Joan of Arc, just below my 
window, had a drum and a cornet at the door; a 
peep-show had a piano, and shots were fired all day 
long in the "Tir des Salons," next door to the 

237 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

"Theatre Moderne," which had a small band. 
Then, all around, clinging still closer to the skirts 
of the church, were caravans and tents, in which 
all these motley people lived and slept and did their 
cooking. They swarmed about it like a crowd of 
insects, throwing up their little mounds in the 
earth ; and the church rose calmly, undisturbed, 
almost unconscious of the very existence of the 
swarm, as the Eternal Church rises out of the agita- 
tions and feverish coming-and-going of the world 
and the fashions of the world. 

V. 

Very characteristic of Dieppe, I thought, and 
certainly quite unlike anything you can see in 
England, is the aspect of the Place Nationale on a 
market-day, with its statue of Duquesne, so brilliant 
and vivid in his great, flapping hat, standing there 
in the middle; it reminded me somewhat of the 
Good-Friday fair at Venice, which is held round 
the Goldoni statue near the Rialto. But the 
colours, despite the strong sunlight, are far from 
Venetian. At the cathedral end of the square are 
the butchers ; then come the vegetables, splashes 
of somewhat tawdry green, all over the ground, 
and up and down the stalls. The vegetables reach 
nearly as far as the statue ; just this side of it begin 
the clothes and commodities, which give its fair- 
like air to the market. Stalls alternate with ground- 
plots, all alike covered with cheap trousers, flannel 
238 



Dieppe, 1895. 

shirts, heavy boots and carpet shoes, braces, foulards, 
handkerchiefs, stays, bright ribbons, veils, balls of 
worsted, shoe-laces, and, above all, dress-pieces of 
every sort of common and trumpery pattern. The 
women stop, handle them, draw them out, and the 
saleswoman waits with a long pair of scissors in her 
hand to cut off a slice here, a slice there. One 
dainty little covered stall has nothing but white 
Norman caps, laid in rows and hung in rows, one 
after another. White-capped old peasant women 
stop in front of it, compare the frilling with their 
own, and try to make a bargain out of a sou. Not 
for off is an open and upturned umbrella full of 
babies' white caps and stomachers. A dazzling 
collection of tin spoons and gilt studs lies on the 
ground beside it, and the proprietors squat on 
their heels close by. After the clothes comes a 
little assemblage of baskets, brushes, and tin pails 
and saucepans, dazzlingly white in the sun. Then 
come the poultry, crates, and baskets of dead and 
living fowls and ducks and geese, with a few outside 
specimens ; and then, as we reach the street, where 
the market flows all the way up and down, from 
the quay to the Cafe des Tribunaux, we have the fruit 
and flowers ; the fruit all in pale yellows, with the 
vivid red of tomatoes : the flowers mainly white 
and red, with a row of small palms along the pave- 
ment. And as one follows the crowded alleys 
between the stalls one elbows against slow, staring 
country-people, the blither natives of the town, 
the indifferent visitors, and now and again a little 

239 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

lounging line of sailors or fishermen in their sea- 
stained drab or brown. 

The second-hand section of the market is strewn 
all around the cathedral, mainly about its front, 
and along the Rue de 1 'Granger. Looking down 
from my window opposite the great doorway, the 
whole ground seems carpeted with old clothes, so 
old, so dirty, so discoloured, that one wonders 
equally how they could have got there, and how 
those who have brought them can possibly imagine 
that they will ever find purchasers. There are 
coats and trousers, petticoats and bodices, stockings, 
bed-covers, and even mattresses (once a whole 
four-poster was placed on the pavement, which it 
completely filled, just outside my door); everything 
that can be folded is folded neatly, with a great 
economy of space; and at intervals are collections 
of boots laid along side by side, eccentricities of 
rusty iron, which always look so amusing and so 
useless ; old books, prints, frames, vases, tall hats, 
lamps, clocks under glass cases, crockery, and 
concertinas. There is a collection of earthenware, 
which is new; and there are some new teapots, 
ribbons, and tin pans. Beyond, where the Rue 
Ste. Catherine narrows back to the arcade at the 
side of the church, the market-carts are laid in rows, 
resting on their shafts. Few people pass. I 
have never actually seen anything bought, though 
I would not take upon myself to say that it never 
happens. 



240 



Dieppe, 1895. 
VI. 

The most absolutely romantic spot in Dieppe, 
a spot more absolutely romantic to its square inch 
than anything I ever saw, is the little curiosity-shop 
in the Rue de la Barre. You look in through a long 
sort of covered alley, lined on both sides with old 
tables, and mirrors, and bookshelves, and huge 
wooden ejfi&gies of saints, and plaster casts, and 
scraps of modern carpentry, and you see at the 
farther end what looks like a garden of antiquities, 
in which all the oddities of the earth seem to be 
growing up out of trees and clinging on to vines, 
tier above tier. You go in a little way, and you see, 
first, an upper floor facing you, all the front covered 
with glass, in which are laid out the most precious 
items, the inlaid tables, the Empire clocks, the Louis 
XV. chairs. You go in a little farther still, and 
you find yourself in the garden of antiquities, 
which is even more fantastic and impossible than 
its first aspect had intimated. It fills the square 
of a little court, round which curls a very old house 
trailed over with vines and creepers ; a house all 
windows and doors, one of the doors opening on 
a spiral stone staircase like the staircase of a tower. 
At the farther end there is a glass covering, like an 
unfinished conservatory; creepers stretch across 
underneath the glass, and, in a huge mound, piled 
quite up to the creepers so that they are covered 
with its dust, I know not what astonishing bric-d-brac, 
a mound which fills the whole centre of the court. 

241 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

There are chairs and tables, beds, bundles, chests, 
pictures in frames, all sorts of iron things, and, very 
conspicuously, two battered wooden representations 
of the flames of hell (as I imagine), the red paint 
much worn from their artichoke-like shoots. All 
around the walls, wherever there is room for a nail 
between a window and a vine-branch, something is 
hung, plaster bas-reliefs and masks, Louis XVI. 
mirrors, lanterns, Japanese prints, arm-chairs with- 
out seats ; frankly, an incredible rigmarole. I saw 
few desirable objects, but the charm of the whole 
place, its unaccountability, its absurd and delightful 
romanticism, made up in themselves a picture 
which hardly needed to be painted, it was so 
obviously a picture already. 

VII. 

One of the most characteristic corners of Dieppe 
lies in the unfashionable end of the town, the fisher 
quarter by the harbour, where the boats come in 
from Newhaven. Where the basin narrows to a 
close passage, just before you are past the pier, 
and in the open sea, there are two crucifixes, one 
on either side, guarding Dieppe. The boats lie 
all along the quay, their masts motionless above 
the water, and it is along the quay that the train 
from Paris comes crawling in its odd passage through 
the town. Arcades, reminding one of Padua, run 
along the townward side of the quay; they are 
stocked with cheap restaurants, and most of them 
242 



Dieppe, 1895. 

have tiny balconies on the first floor, just under the 
roof of the arcades, and all of them have spread 
tables in the passage-way itself: waiters and women 
stroll up and down continually, touting for cus- 
tomers. From one of the little balconies you can 
look across the fish-market, beyond the masts, 
across the water, to the green hill opposite, with its 
votive church on the summit. The picture is 
framed in the oval of one of the arches, and it looks 
curiously theatrical, and charmingly so, over the 
heads of the fisher-people and townsfolk who 
throng there. The crier passes, beating his drum; 
sometimes, about dinner-time, a company of strolling 
musicians, a harpist, his wife and daughter who 
play violins (the little one with an air of professional 
distinction) linger outside one of the cafes. Along 
the quay, which stretches out towards the pier, 
is a broken line of old, many-coloured houses ; 
there are endless little restaurants, hotels, and cafesy 
meant mainly for the sailors, and two cafes concerts 
of the seaside sort, with a piano (the pianist in one 
of them has been an organist in Paris ; drinks, of 
course, and reproaches destiny), the usual platform, 
and the usual enormous women, hoarse, strident, 
and decolletees, who collect your pennies in a shell 
after every song. There is a night cafe, too, on the 
quay, which you can enter at any hour : you tap 
on the glass door, a curtain is drawn back, and, if 
you are not an agent, you will have no difficulty in 
entering. An agent, when he makes his tour of 
inspection, has sometimes to wait a little, while a 

243 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

pack of drinkers is hurriedly bundled out at the 
back door. M. Jean's licence appears to be some- 
what vague ; the report that an agent is at the door 
causes a charming little thrill of excitement among 
his customers. Some of his customers, who are 
fishermen, I do not altogether like; their friendli- 
ness was a little boisterous ; and, sometimes, when 
they lost their temper, M. Jean would knock them 
down, and roll them, quite roughly, out of the door. 
On the other side of the water, on the Pollet, as 
it is called, you find the real home of the fishermen, 
in those little battered houses, twisting around all 
sorts of odd corners, climbing up all sorts of odd 
heights, some of them with wooden beams along 
the front, all dirty with age, all open to the street, 
all with swarms of draggled, blue-eyed, gold-haired 
children playing around their doors. In a few 
corners one sees women making nets, once an in- 
dustry, now fallen into some disuse. The whole 
place is thick with dust, faded with years, shrivelled 
with poverty; but Dowson loved it more than any 
part of Dieppe. 

VIII. 

The charm of Dieppe ! No, I can never give 
the real sense of that charm to any one who has 
never experienced it ; for myself, it is not even 
easy to realise all the elements which have gone 
to make up the happiness of these two summer 
months here. It always rests me, in body and 
244 



Dieppe, 1895. 

mind, to be near the sea; and then Dieppe is so 
placid and indulgent, lets you have your way with 
it, is full of relief for you, in old corners and cool 
streets, warm and cool at once, if you take but 
five steps from the Rue Aguado, modern and 
fashionable along the sea-front, dazzling with sun- 
light, into any one of the little streets that branch 
off from it townwards. And if the sun beats on 
you again as you come out into the square about 
Saint-Jacques you have but to go inside; better 
still, if you seek the finer interior of Saint-Remy; 
and, suddenly, you have the liquid coldness of stone 
arches that have never felt the sun. And then the 
sea, at night, from the jetty : the vast space of 
water, fading mistily into the unseen limits of the 
horizon, a boat, a sail, just distinguishable in its 
midst, the lights along the shore, the glow of the 
Casino, with all its windows golden, an infinite 
softness in the air. I have spent all night wandering 
about the beach, I have traced every change in sea 
and sky from twilight to sunrise, inconceivable 
delicacies of colour, rarities of tone. And what 
dreams have floated up in the smoke of my cigarette, 
mere smoke that would never reach the stars ! 
What memories I have evoked, what unforgotten 
talks I have had, in the cool of the evening, on that 
jetty ! And the country round Dieppe, rarely as 
I went into it, that, too, means something for me : 
Puys, where I went with Beardsley to see Alexandre 
Dumas, in the house in which his father died, the 
house where so many of his own plays have been 

245 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

written; Pourville, the road along the difFs; 
Varengeville, with its deep, enchanting country- 
lanes, its little sunken ways through the woods, its 
strange, stiff little pine-woods on the heights ; the 
Manoir d'Ango, with its delicate approach through 
soft alleys of trees, and past a little shadowed pool, 
the palace degraded into a farm, but still with its 
memories of Francis I. and Diane de Poitiers, 
whose faces one sees, cheek by cheek, on a double 
medallion; Arques la Bataille, with its Italian 
landscape, so cunningly composed about the ruined 
castle on the hill. There is nothing in or near 
Dieppe which does not, in one way or another, 
appeal to me ; nowhere that I do not feel at home. 
And the friends I have made, or found, or fancied 
at Dieppe, men and women of such varying charm 
and interest ! The most amiable soul in all the 
world resides, I think, in the Anglo-maniac French 
painter in whose chalet I spent, so agreeably, so 
much of my time, in the studio where he paints 
the passing beauties as they fly. Was there not, 
too, the hospitable Norwegian painter, with the 
heart of a child in the body of a giant, who lived with 
his frank and friendly wife in the villa on the hill, 
where I spent so many good-tempered evenings ? 
And the young English painter, Conder, who was 
my chief companion, a temperament of 1830, n'e 
romantique, in whose conversation I found the subtle 
superficialities of a profoundly sensitive individuality, 
it was an education in the fine shades to be with 
him. The other younger Englishman, an artist 
246 



Dieppe, 1895. 

of so different a kind, came into our little society 
with a refreshing and troubling hizarrerie; all that 
feverish brilliance, the boyish defiance of things, 
the frail and intense vitality, how amusing and un- 
common it was ! And there were the two French 
poets, again so different from one another; elegant 
and enthusiastic youth, and the insistent reflective- 
ness of a mind always reasoning. And then the 
charming women one met as they flitted to and fro 
between Dieppe and Paris and London and Monte 
Carlo ; the little French lady whose mother had 
been one of the Court beauties of the Second 
Empire; her profile de mouton, with the hysterical 
piquancy of a mouth, perfect in repose, which would 
never rest : heartless, exquisite, posing little person ! 
And there was Cleo de Merode, with her slim, 
natural, and yet artificial elegance, her little, straight 
face, so virginal and yet so aware, under the 
Madonna-like placidity of those smooth coils of 
hair, drawn over the ears and curved along the 
forehead ; it is Cleo de Merode, who, more than 
any one else, sums up Dieppe for me. How many 
other beautiful faces there were, people one never 
knew, and yet, meeting them at every hour, at 
dinner, on the terrace of the Casino, at the tables, 
in the sea, one seemed to know them almost better 
than one's friends, and to be known by them just 
as well. Much of the charm of life exists for me 
in the unspoken interest which forms a sort of 
electric current between oneself and strangers. It 
is a real emotion to me, satisfying, in a sense, for 

247 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

the very reason that it leaves one unsatisfied. And 
of this kind of emotion Dieppe, in the season, is 
bewilderingly abundant. Is it, after all, surprising 
that I should have come to Dieppe with the intention 
of staying from Saturday to Monday, and that I 
should have stayed for two months ? 

Summer, 1895. 



248 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

I. 

Under the trees in the dell, 

Here by the side of the stream. 
Were it not pleasant to dream, 

Were it not better to dwell ? 

Here is the blue of the sea. 
Here is the green of the land, 
Valley and meadow and sand, 

Sea-bird and cricket and bee ; 

Cows in a field on the hill, 

Farmyards a-fluster with pigs. 
Blossoming birds on the twigs ; 

Cool, the old croon of the mill. 

At Helston the last Cornish railway ends, on a 
railed motor-track coming from Gwinear Road ; 
and from Helston to Poltescoe it is a drive of ten 
miles, for the last part of the way along the edge 
of Goonhilly Downs. As we come into Poltescoe 
Valley the road becomes steeper, and we climb 
and descend through high green hedges, until, just 
after the bridge, we turn aside into a narrow lane, 
and, after passing a double cottage and a smithy, 
come around a slow curve to the thatched cottage 
standing inside a little garden. There are fields 
on the slope of a hill opposite, and, lower down, 
where the road turns around an edge of solid rock, 
there is a stream, going by an old mill, and, beyond 
it, a steep rocky hill, with clusters of trees, bracken, 
gorse, and rough green foliage, rising up against 
the sky, between the valley and the sea. 

249 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

I have never lived in so peaceful a place, and 
the old miller who lives by himself at the mill — 
"like a single plover," he tells me — says that the 
people like the restfulness and do not willingly 
leave it. The washerwoman who has part of the 
double cottage along the lane says that she would 
go mad if she went to live in a town, and that the 
mere thought of it, sometimes, as she goes in and 
out of her door all day long, makes her feel uneasy. 
The miller says that the people do not notice the 
beauty of the place much, because they are used to 
it ; but he himself told me that, so far as he can 
hear, it is the prettiest place in England, 

The cottage has a few disadvantages. One is 
that I cannot stand quite upright in either of the 
lower rooms. When a labourer lived in it there was, 
of course, a stone floor, and the wooden floor which 
the new landlord has put in has brought the ceiling 
lower. Where the ceiling is plain I can stand up- 
right ; but there are cross-beams, and the doors are 
lower than the cross-beams, and I have to go about 
stooping, for fear of dashing my head against one 
or the other. 

Then there is that very decorative and in some 
ways practical thing, a thatched roof. I have always 
wanted to sleep under a thatched roof, but the actual 
experience has chilled my enthusiasm. There is 
the delight of looking at it from the hill going up 
to Ruan Minor, like a corkscrew, on the other side 
of the valley; and there is the delight of sitting 
under the eaves and hearing the sudden soft rustle 
250 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

of wings as the birds fly in and out of their nests 
among the thatch. But when you find, on going 
to bed, a httle red worm sitting on the pillow ; when 
black spots of various shapes and sizes begin to 
move and crawl on the wall and ceiling; when the 
open window, which lets in all the scents and 
sounds of the country, lets in also whatever creeps 
and flies among the bushes — sleep under a thatched 
roof becomes a less desirable thing. 

But for these slight drawbacks, which have their 
compensations as one sits at night, reading by lamp- 
light, in rooms so pleasantly and quaintly pro- 
portioned, and the painted butterflies and sombre 
moths come in at the window and dash themselves 
ecstatically at the light : well, I can ask no more 
of a cottage. And then, with the cottage, have we 
not the indispensable Mrs. Pascoe, and is not Mrs. 
Pascoe the contriver of all expedients and the journal 
and encylopsedia of all local knowledge ? 



II. 

All day I watch the sun and rain 
That come and go and come again, 
The doubtful twilights, and, at dawn 
And sunset, curtains half withdrawn 
From open windows of the sky. 
The birds sing and the sea-gulls cry 
All day in many tongues ; the bees 
Hum in and out under the trees 
Where the capped foxglove on his stem 
Shakes all his bells and nods to them. 

251 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

All day under the rain and sun 
The hours go over one by one, 
Brimmed up with delicate events 
Of moth-flights and the birth of scents 
And evening deaths of butterflies. 
And I, withdrawn into my eyes 
From that strict tedious world within, 
Each day with joyous haste begin 
To live a new day through, and then 
Sleep, and then live it through again. 

What gives its chief charm to the country about 
Poltescoe Valley is its intimate mingling of two 
separate kinds of scenery — the wildest scenery of 
rocks, cliflFs, and the sea, and the softest and most 
luxuriant scenery of an inland valley. And the 
two are not merely there side by side, but they 
interpenetrate one another in an indefinite series 
of surprises. Walking across meadows, one comes 
suddenly upon a ridge of rocks, like a reef in the 
sea, coming up out of the grass, and partly covered 
with greenery; sea-birds fly among rocks or stand 
in companies on the fields ; one hears the sound 
of waves dashing on unseen cliffs as one saunters 
through a lane deep between hedges ; a wheat-field 
stands out detached on a hill summit against the 
white sails of a ship at sea. 

Among these valleys and on the wooded tops 
of the hills there are flowers around every cottage ; 
flowers climb up the walls and about the door- 
posts, geraniums, nasturtiums, red and pink and 
veined roses ; arum-lilies grow in the narrow strip 
of front garden; there are clusters of fuchsia and 
252 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

veronica, there are hydrangeas and gladiolas and 
dahhas ; and the hedges are full of honeysuckle, 
of foxgloves, of blue and yellow flowers. The air, 
as one passes, is laden with sweets ; warm, aromatic 
winds blow softly across one's face; and the sleek 
and shining cattle graze in fields green to the sea's 
edge, and rest under the shadow of wide trees. At 
low tide the cows come down from the fields to 
Kennack Bay, and walk to and fro on the sand, 
pausing and looking at the sea, the rocks, and drink- 
ing from the streams of fresh water that run down 
the sand. Slow cart-horses, that walk freely about 
the lanes at all hours of the day and night, come down 
to the bay, and trudge to and fro, and lay their heads 
on one another's shoulders as they stand sleepily 
together. 

After sunset, if you go up the road as far as 
Kuggar, and stand there between the fields and the 
sea, you will hear the drones humming by the way- 
side and throbbing about the flowers and gorse in 
the hedges, red cows graze in green fields, and you 
hear the deep, half-human sigh of some unseen 
beast behind the hedge, or a few late twitters among 
the branches. There is a moon in the pale sky 
growing from faint silver to a sickle golden as ripe 
corn; wide green valleys rising and dipping like 
sea waves, almost to the edge of the cliff^s that go 
down dark into the sea ; and, as far as the rim of 
the sky, the sea, grey-blue, motionless except where 
it curls into abrupt white waves and breaks into 
foam around the rocks or upon the beach. And 

253 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

as you stand there, seeing only faint sights and 
hearing only faint sounds, there is a delicate loneli- 
ness in things, not like a real feeling, not a weight, 
but an impression, vague and dim-coloured and 
wholly pleasant, like the sentiment, not of real 
things, but of a picture. 

From Poltescoe the nearest way down to the 
sea is by Carleon Cove, but I only pass there on 
my way to the cliffs leading to Cadgwith ; I never 
linger there. It is disfeatured and defeated, an 
ugly gash in the clifF-side. There is always some- 
thing gloomy and uncomfortable in its cramped 
bed of pebbles, the great dark clifF, covered thinly 
with green turf, which rises to so steep a height 
above it, and the broken and deserted sheds, chim- 
neys, and water-wheel, where the serpentine works 
had been. The water still runs along a wooden 
tray from the river to the great wheel, and some- 
times, by accident, the rusty thing begins to turn, 
with a ghastly clanking, like a dead thing galvanised 
into some useless and unnatural semblance of life. 
The place is uncanny, like all solitary places which 
men have spoiled and then deserted. 

Kennack Bay, where there is always a stretch 
of sand, and at low tide a long expanse of it, is like 
a broad and cheerful face, open to the light. You 
enter the bay by a latched gate, and then, at most 
seasons, cross a brook by stepping-stones. At 
each end of the sand there are clusters of rocks, 
beginning under the cliffs, and on one side going 
out a long way into the sea, looking at low tide like 

254 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

the brown ridged backs of crocodiles that have swum 
to the surface of the water. On the other side the 
rocks nearest to the cHfFs are seen, as you go near 
them, to be coloured as if the liquid colours of the 
sea, its many greens and its purple stains over hidden 
rocks, had been reflected and frozen in stone. 
When the tide is out, the farther rocks, left bare 
by the sea, are seen in strange outlines, sharp, 
broken, as if hewn into cavities and suffering from 
many rents and gashes. And there is one "cirque 
of fantastic rocks," half enclosing a little sea-pool, 
and flanked by a tall, broad, and twisted rock, 
which is like the sea cavern in Leonardo's Virgin 
of the Rocks. Animal content can go no farther 
than to lie, after bathing, on a natural pillow of 
hollowed rocks on the green edge of the cliffy, and 
to look out through half-shut eyelids upon the wet 
sand of the beach, the dark semicircle of cliff's going 
round to the Lizard, and the softer semicircle of 
thin green meadows and wooded hollows inland; 
with the blue sky and the bluer sea, coloured like 
the Mediterranean, all around and all over one, 
glittering evenly in the sunlight. Little white 
waves break on the beach, with a low continuous 
sound of falling water ; a bird's shadow darkens 
the sand, and if you lift your hat-brim you see the 
white sea-bird ; sheep and cows bend over the grass 
together in fields ; sleep hangs over land and sea 
with a delicate oppression. 



255 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

III. 

The woodpecker laughed as he sat on the bough. 

This morning, 

To give fair warning, 
And the rain's in the valley now. 

Look now and listen : I hear the noise 

Of the thunder. 

And deep down under 
The sea's voice answers the voice. 

All the leaves of the valley are glad. 

And the birds too, 

If they had words to. 
Would tell of the joy they had. 

Only you at the window, with rueful lips 

Half pouting. 

Stand dumb and doubting. 
And drum with your finger-tips. 

Cornish rain is a cheerful, persistent dov^npour, 
which comes down softly in a warm flood, washing 
the whole valley and the trees, and burnishing the 
grassy sides of the valley, and lying like a dark mist 
over the faded headlands and the grey sea. The 
stream that generally trickles over the pebbles by 
the old mill has swollen to a yellow river, and takes 
broad leaps from stone to stone. One can hear 
the whips of the rain steadily lashing the hedges 
and the trees. And, louder than the sound of wind 
and rain, is heard the sound of the river rushing, 
like the sound of the sea. 

Going down to Kennack Bay, at high tide, after 
256 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

a day of ceaseless rain, one sees a line of white foam 
around the whole coast, edging a sea which has 
turned to a strange leaden green, veiled with sea- 
mist, which comes driving across it in a wet vapour, 
which, as it floats up the valley, looks like a trans- 
parent gauze. One breathes water, one sees scarce 
anything but water, the solid mass of the sea and 
a racing vapour in the air ; one hears nothing but 
water. The long level clifF going out to Pedn 
Boar has faded to a dim outline in a mist ; white 
mists settle on the upper fields in the valley : the 
whole earth seems to melt away into a wreck and 
image of water. 

Walking, after the rain, on the clifFs towards 
Cadgwith, the air is at once salt and sweet ; the 
scent of the sea and of the earth mingles in it ; and 
it is as if one drank a perfumed wine, in which there 
is a sharp and suave intoxication. Overhead the 
sea-gulls curve in wide circles ; you see them at 
one moment black against the pale sky, then white 
against the dark cliffs, then matching the flakes of 
foam on the sea as they fly low over it. They poise 
in the air, and cry and laugh with their mocking 
half-human voices ; and are always passing to and 
fro in some rhythm or on some business of their 
own. 

Or, if one would taste a new sensation, neither of 
valley, cliff, nor sea, one has but to turn inland from 
Kennack and cross the downs. A path leads up 
between hedges full of honeysuckle, gorse, and tall 
white heather, among steep rocks covered almost 

257 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

all over with green. Where the downs begin you 
can see the sea, behind you, caught in an angle of 
the land ; and then the moorland, barer and barer, 
until green turf stretches flat to a line of tall black 
trees against the sky. A straight, flat, narrow 
road goes across the downs, and as one walks along 
it there is a sense of loneliness which is bare, severe, 
but not desolate or unfriendly. The wind blows 
across them from the sea, as from a living thing 
not far off"; and there is the freedom, the unspoilt 
homeliness, of the earth left to itself. 



IV. 

To live and die under a roof 
Drives the brood of thoughts aloof; 
To walk by night under the sky 
Lets the birds of thought fly ; 
Thoughts that may not fly abroad 
Rot like lilies in the road ; 
But the thoughts that fly too far 
May singe their wings against a star. 

Outside the valley you may walk from sea to 
sea by land. If you go north-west, you will come 
to Cover ack, along cliffs which grow barer and 
barer as the trees dwindle and the road slopes down 
to the seashore. If you go southward, you will 
come to Cadgwith and the Lizard ; and, again, 
as you leave the region of Poltescoe Valley, you 
will find the cliff's growing barer and barer, and will 
come north-west to Kynance Cove, and thence to 
258 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

Mullion, which lies almost level with Coverack, 
on the other side of Cornwall. 

Coverack is a cluster of white houses built on 
the side of a headland which goes out delicately 
into the sea, curving round to the harbour, which 
the lowest houses seem to go down into. Low 
green land goes out across a breadth of water to 
form a bay; and you see the roads sloping precipi- 
tately over the downs to the pebbles on the edge of 
the blue water, and right above the roofs of the 
houses. On the other side of the headland there 
is another breadth of water ; one feels the open sea. 

At Cadgwith you see the sea from the beach 
as through the frame of a doorway narrowed to 
that measure; and the cramped and peevish beach 
is split in two by a rocky promontory, and gripped 
on either side by a tall clifF, which on one side is 
bare rock, and on the other a great swath of green, 
as if combed upward by the wind. Sea-gulls sit 
there, on the edge of the land, clustered like a bed 
of lilies ; or swoop downward and fly to and fro 
over the beach, among the litter of boats and nets 
and lobster-pots, when the fishermen are cleaning 
the fish. Looking down from above, thick trees 
and the fold of sloping green meadows cut oflF all 
of the village but its brown thatched roofs and a 
glimpse of white-washed walls. It huddles there 
in the cleft of the valley where the valley slips feet 
foremost into the sea. 

At MuUion Cove you are as if imprisoned, deep 
down, inside a narrow harbour, no more than two 

259 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

boat-lengths wide at the entrance, where the sea 
chafes at the wall and at the rocks planted hugely 
without, great black heights which cut off half 
the sunlight as you pass into their shadow. Sea- 
gulls sit there in shoals, crying against the wind. 
There is a fierce seclusion in the place, disquieting, 
and with its own narrow and unfriendly charm. 

Kynance Cove, with its mysterious regular 
daily appearance and disappearance, is like the 
work of a wizard, who has arranged its coming and 
going for magical purposes of his own, and has laid 
this carpet of pure sand about the bases of fantastic 
rocks and under the roof of sombre caverns, and has 
set the busy sea to wash and polish and scrub with 
sand and stones the smooth surface of the rocks 
and caverns, until they glow with a kind of flushed 
and fiery darkness, in which can be discerned colours 
of green and red and purple and grey, veining the 
substance of the rock as with the green of the sea 
and the purple of heather and as with pale jade and 
as with clots of blood. The cove is sunk deeply 
between green and stony cliffs, and the sea washes 
into it from all sides, hissing and shouting in crevices 
and passages which it has split and bored in the 
rock itself. It is a battle-ground of the sea, and a 
place of wild freshness, and a home of sea-birds. 
Man comes into it on sufferance, and at hours not 
of his choosing. He sets his wit against the craft 
of the tide, and wins no more than a humble edge 
or margin of permission. 

I came first upon the Lizard across heathery 
260 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

grass smelling of honey and sea-wind, on a day 
towards sunset when the sea lay steel blue to the 
immense circle of the horizon; fierce clouds rose 
there like barriers of solid smoke, and where the 
sun set unseen behind a cloudy darkness, throwing 
a broad sheet of shining light across the water, I 
could see a long line of land going out towards 
Land's End, hardly distinguishable from the spume 
and froth of rain-clouds darkening upon it. Un- 
limited water, harsh rock, steep precipices going 
down sheer into the sea; in the sea, fierce jags of 
rock, with birds clustered on them, and little circles 
of white foam around their bases ; the strong air and 
stormy light seemed in keeping with this end of 
land where England goes farthest south into the sea. 

V. 

Leaves and grasses and the rill 

That babbles by the water-mill ; 

Bramble, fern, and bulrushes, 

Honeysuckle and honey-bees ; 

Summer rain and summer sun 

By turns before the day is done ; 

Rainy laughter, twilight whir. 

The nighthawk and the woodpecker; 

These and such as these delights 

Attend upon our days and nights. 

With the honey-heavy air. 

Thatched slumber, cream, and country fare. 

In the valley, across fields in which rocks like 
the rocks on the seashore grow naturally, with ferns 
and bramble about them, buried deep among old 

261 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

trees, murmuring with rooks, there is a decayed 
manor-house, now a farm, called Erisey : an 
Erisey of Erisey is said to have danced before 
James I. The road leads over many Cornish stiles, 
and through farmyards where cows wait around 
the milking-stool, or hens scratch beside the barn 
door, or pigs hurry to a trough. The air is heavy 
with scents from the hedges and with the clean, 
homely odour of farms ; there is nothing in this 
wooded place to remind one that the sea lies on the 
other side of a few fields. And yet I have always 
felt some obscure, inexplicable, uneasy sense or 
suggestion when I come near this old house set 
over against a little wood, in which Melisande 
might have walked ; the wood has a solemn entrance, 
through curved and pillared stone gateways ; the 
grass is vivid green underfoot, and the tree trunks 
go up straight in a formal pattern. The old house 
at the door of the wood seems to slumber uneasily, 
as if secrets were hidden there, somewhere behind 
the thick ivy and the decayed stone. The villagers 
will not go that way after dark, because of a field 
that lies on the road there, which they call Dead- 
man's Field. 

Sunset comes delicately into the wood at Erisey, 
setting gold patches to dance on the dark trunks 
of the trees. But it is from the downs, or from 
the croft which lies between the cottage and the 
sea, that I like best to see the day end. From the 
downs, or from the road just above the cottage, 
the sky has often that amber light which Coleridge 
262 



A Valley in Cornwall. 

notes in his poems ; with infinite gradations of 
green, and a strange heaping of sullen and bodiless 
clouds against pure brightness. From the fields 
at Carleon, between the valley and the sea, night is 
seen touching the valley into a gentle and glowing 
harmony. The valley, a deep dell sunk into the 
midst of a circle of rocks covered with thin green 
foliage, is a nest and bower of soft trees, which rise 
cluster above cluster almost to the edge of the sky, 
where the rocky line of the fields ends it. Above, 
you see the bars of colour left over by the sunset; 
the moon hangs aloft between the valley and the 
sea ; and as the valley withdraws into the rich dark- 
ness of the earth, the sea still glitters with grey 
light, to where white clouds come down out of the 
sky and rest upon it. 

Tidings of the outer world come but rarely into 
the valley, except by way of the sky. Once a day 
the old postman comes down from Ruan Minor, 
and takes the letters back to the post-office. At 
times the sound of a siren, like the lowing of a brazen 
ox, comes paradoxically into the midst of the hot 
inland scents. At times a farm-boy following the 
cows, or a man sitting on the shafts of his cart, passes, 
whistling; and the tune will be a hymn tune, "Jesu, 
lover of my soul," or an air as old as "Rule 
Britannia," taken very slowly. If you hear the 
people talking to one another in the lane, you will 
notice that they speak and reply in phrases out 
of the Bible, as in a language of which they can 
catch every allusion. They never pass one another 

263 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

without stopping to talk, and every one of them 
greets you with the time of the day as you pass. 
All day long the tree before the door of the 
cottage is filled with music, and at night, when the 
moon is up, the sky before the windows is flooded 
with strange shapes and motions of light. I have 
never seen the moon's magic so nimbly or so con- 
tinuously at work as upon that space of sky where 
the higher ridges of the croft ended. Kingdoms 
and seas of cloud passed before us under that calm 
radiance; they passed, leaving the sky clear for 
the stars ; the polar star stood over the cottage, 
and the Great Bear flung out his paws at the moon. 

Gold and blue of a sunset sky. 

Bees that buzz with a sleepy tune, 

A lowing cow and a cricket's cry, 
Swallows flying across the moon. 

Swallows flying across the moon. 

The trees darken, the fields grow white; 
Day is over, and night comes soon : 

The wings are all gone into the night. 

Summer, 1904. 



264 



At the Land's End. 

The temperament of Cornish landscape has many 
moods and will fit into no formula. To-day I have 
spent the most flawless day of any summer I can 
remember on the sands of Kennack Bay, at the 
edge of that valley in Cornwall which I have written 
about in these pages. Sea and sky were like opals, 
with something in them of the colour of absinthe; 
and there was a bloom like the bloom on grapes 
over all the outlines of cliff and moorland, the steep 
rocks glowing in the sunshine with a warm and rich 
and soft and coloured darkness. Every outline 
was distinct, yet all fell into a sort of harmony, 
which was at once voluptuous and reticent. The 
air was like incense and the sun like fire, and the 
whole atmosphere and aspect of things seemed 
to pass into a kind of happy ecstasy. Here all 
nature seemed good ; yet, in that other part of 
Cornwall from which I have but just come, the 
region of the Land's End, I found myself among 
formidable and mysterious shapes, in a world of 
granite rocks that are fantastic by day, but by 
night become ominous and uncouth, like the halls 
of giants, with giants sitting in every doorway, erect 
and unbowed, watching against the piratical on- 
slaughts of the sea. 

About the Land's End the land is bare, harsh, 
and scarred ; here and there are fields of stunted 
grass, stony, and hedged with low hedges of bare 
stones, Hke the fields of Galway ; and, for the rest, 
haggard downs of flowerless heather, sown with 

265 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

grey rocks, and gashed with lean patches through 
which the naked soil shows black. The cliffs are 
of granite and go down sheer into the sea, naked, 
or thinly clad with lichen, grey, green, and occasion- 
ally orange; they are built up with great blocks 
and columns, or stacked together in tiers, fitted 
and clamped like cyclopean architecture; or climb 
rock by rock, leaning inwards, or lean outward, 
rock poised upon rock, as if a touch would dislodge 
them, poised and perpetual. They are heaped 
into altars, massed into thrones, carved by the sea 
into fantastic shapes of men and animals ; they are 
like castles and like knights in armour; they are 
split and stained, like bulwarks of rusty iron, 
blackened with age and water; they are like the 
hulls of old battleships, not too old to be impreg- 
nable ; and they have human names and the names 
of beasts. They nod and peer with human heads 
and wigs, open sharks' fangs out of the water, 
strut and poise with an uncouth mockery of motion, 
and are as if mysteriously and menacingly alive. 

This is the land of giants : there is the Giant's 
Chair at Tol-Pedn, and the Giant's Pulpit at Bos- 
cawen, and the Giant's Foot at Tolcarne, and the 
Giant's Hand on Carn Brea. And there is a 
mediaeval humour in Cornish legends which still 
plays freakishly with the devil and with the saints. 
Here, more than anywhere in Cornwall, I can under- 
stand the temper of Cornish legends, because here 
I can see the visible images of popular beliefs : 
the Satanic humour, the play of giants, the goblin 
266 



At the Land's End. 

gambols of the spirits of the earth and of the sea. 
The scenery here is not subhme, nor is it exquisite, 
as in other parts of the county ; but it has a gross 
earthly gaiety, as of Nature untamed and uncouth ; 
a rough playmate, without pity or unkindness, wild, 
boisterous, and laughing. There is an eerie laughter 
along these coasts, which seem made not only for 
the wreckers who bloodied them, and for the 
witches whose rocky chairs are shown you, where 
they sat brewing tempests, but for the tormented 
and ridiculous roarings of Tregeagle and the ele- 
mental monsters. 

In this remote, rocky, and barren land there is 
an essential solitude, which nothing, not the hotel, 
nor the coming and going of people in the middle 
of the day, can disturb. Whenever I get right 
out to the last point of rocks, where one looks 
straight down, as if between walls of granite, to the 
always white and chafing water, I feel at once alone 
and secure, hke a bird in a cleft of the rock. There 
is the restfulness of space, the noise of sea-birds 
and the sea, and nothing else but silence. The 
sea-gulls cry and laugh night and day ; night and 
day you hear the sea crying and laughing ; sails 
and smoke pass on the sea, this side and that side 
of the Longships lighthouse, which stands, beautiful 
and friendly, on the reef in the water; and along 
the land, at morning and evening, nothing moves, 
all is waste, wide, and silent. Little brown donkeys 
start up among the rocks as you walk across the 

267 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

cliffs at night ; fat slugs lie in the way of your 
feet, black and burnished as coal; you see a 
vague movement, grey upon grey, and it is "the 
slow, soft toads," panting and leaping upon the 
stones. 

In this solitude, away from the people of cities, 
one learns to be no longer alone. In the city one 
loses all sense of reality and of relationship. We 
are hedged in from the direct agency of the elements ; 
we are hardly conscious of the seasons but for their 
discomforts ; we are in the midst of manufactured 
things, and might forget that bread grew in the 
ground and that water existed except in pipes and 
cisterns. And the moment we leave the city we 
come to remember again that men and women are 
not alone in the world, but have countless living 
creatures about them, not pets nor beasts of burden, 
and with as much right to the earth and sunlight. 
First, there is the life of the fields and the farm- 
yards, a life attendant on ours, but familiar with 
us while we spare it. Then there is the unlimited 
life of birds, who, in these regions, have foothold 
in the sea as well as on land, and have two provinces, 
of water and of air, to be at home in. And, besides 
these, there is the tiny restless life of insects : the 
butterflies that live for the day, the bees with their 
polished mahogany backs and soft buzz that they 
call here "dummlederries," and that come out in 
the evening, the toads and slugs that come with 
the first dark, and the glow-worms that light their 
little lonely candle of pale gold at night. The 
268 



At the Land's End. 

world suddenly becomes full of living beings, whose 
apparent happiness we are glad to be permitted to 
share. 

In this air, in this region, an air of dreams, a 
region at once formidable and mysterious, every 
hour of the day has its own charm and character, 
which change visibly and in surprising ways. This 
morning was impenetrable with mist, and the light- 
house guns were firing until an hour after sunrise ; 
greyness blotted out the whole sea. At last the 
brown reef of the lighthouse could be distinguished, 
but not the lighthouse ; and then, suddenly, as one 
looked away and looked back again, there was a 
white, shining column, like a column of marble, 
glittering through the mist. As I started to walk 
along the cliffs towards the Logan Rock, I walked 
through wet vapours, soft, enveloping, and delicious. 
The mist faded and returned, showing one, in 
glimpses and under dripping veils, headland after 
headland, rivalling each other in boldness, in archi- 
tecture of strangely shaped and strangely poised 
rocks, bare, splintered, crimped at the edges, cut 
into ladders, sheared into caverns, sundered by 
chasms, heaped crag upon crag with a romantic 
splendour. Now and then the path dropped to a 
little bay of white sand, and in the fishing-creek of 
Porthgwarra I met a little Italian boy with a con- 
certina, who was quite alone, and spoke no English, 
and smiled with complete happiness, though shyly, 
as he told me that he did nothing, nothing. At 

269 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

St. Levan I saw the little church, hidden in a hollow, 
with its beautiful and elaborate wood-carving, a 
whole monkish symbohsm of bold fancy, and, in 
the churchyard, the single grave where the frag- 
ments of fifteen men, lost in the Khyber, had been 
buried, hands and feet and bones, and two heads, 
and one whole man, a Japanese; and, near the 
new grave, the old Levan Stone of splintered 
granite, with grass growing in the gap, of which 
the people say : 

When, with panniers astride 

A pack-horse can ride 

Through the Levan Stone, 

The world will be done. 

The moorlands, in from the clifF, are all desolate, 
covered with short grass and heather, strewn with 
grey rocks, and cut into square patterns by stone 
hedges. About the Logan the shapes of the rocks 
become less grotesque, seem less strangely artificial; 
and the Logan point is like a house of rocks, chamber 
beyond chamber, with its corridors, doorways, and 
windows. 

At mid-day I liked to go to Sennen Cove, 
because the sand there is whiter than any other 
sand, and the green slope above the sand more 
delicately green, and the water bluer and more 
glowing. At high tide the water comes in with a 
rejoicing exuberance, as if drawing into itself all 
the violence of the sun. It is exquisite, on a breath- 
less July day about noon, to he on the white sand 
without thought or memory, an animal in the sun, 
270 



At the Land's End. 

watching the painted sea, throbbing with heat, 
purple, grape-coloured, stained with the shadows 
of clouds and rocks ; seeing the steamers pass as 
the clouds pass, with no more human significance; 
curious of nothing in the world but of the order 
and succession of the waves, their diligence, and 
when the next wave will obliterate the last wave- 
mark. 

Twilight comes on most exquisitely, I think, 
over the cliffs towards Pardennick (the headland 
that Turner painted), looking down on Enys 
Dodman, the bare brown rock sheared off and 
pierced through by the sea, which is the loudest 
home of sea-gulls on the coast. There are rocky 
headlands to right and left, and that rock in the sea 
which they call the Armed Knight, but which to 
me seems like one of the Rhine castles, stands 
there, romantic and spectacular, not like any work 
of nature. Beyond, with the twilight-coloured sea 
around it, is the lighthouse, like a red star alighted 
on a pillar; far off, the golden light of the Wolf, 
and the two lights of Scilly. The sky, where the 
sun has gone down, is barred with dark lines and 
half-obscured outlines, like the outlines of trees 
seen in some shadowy mirror. Faint stains of 
gold and green and pink remain in the sky, still 
bright, and yet softened as if seen through water. 
Opposite, the moon has risen, and hangs in the sky, 
round and white; the sea darkens and shines, with 
strange glimmerings and dim banks of shadow, 
under the two lights from east and from west. 

271 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

There is one boat on the sea : I see the two brown 
sails, and their shadows in the water. From the 
island of the sea-gulls there is a continual barking 
and chattering, as they walk to and fro, or stand 
and shout against the land. The rock darkens, 
and the white birds shine like white lilies growing 
out of brown earth. The castle in the sea turns 
black, and every peak and spire is sharply silhouetted 
upon the palely glittering water. Now it is like 
a magic castle, Klingsor's perhaps ; or perhaps the 
last throne and ultimate stronghold of the night. 

Here at the Land's End one is enveloped by 
water. The hotel, where I have been so well and 
so quietly served, so much alone when the brakes 
and motors do not come in to spoil some of the 
middle hours of the day, is built on the farthest 
habitable peak of land, and from my window I 
looked straight down into the sea, which I could 
see from horizon to horizon. Nothing was around 
me but naked land, nothing in front of me but a 
brief foothold of rocky clifF, and then the whole 
sea. For the first time in my life I could satiate 
my eyes with the sea. 

In the country, between the grass and the sky, 
one may taste a measure of happiness, and the sight 
may be refreshed, rested, healed of many evils. 
But it is as if one ate good food without drinking. 
There is a thirst of sight which must wait unsatisfied 
until the eyes drink the sea. 

Is it not because it is always moving, and because 
272 



At the Land's End. 

one is not moving with it that the sea means so much 
more to one than any possible inland scenery ? A 
tree, a meadow, though it grows and changes, grows 
and changes imperceptibly; I cannot see it in 
motion : it seems to be always there, irritatingly 
immobile. But the sea is always moving past me; 
it is like a friend who comes and goes and is faithful ; 
its motion is all I have to give me some sense of 
permanency in a world where all things grow old 
and pass away, except the sea. Byron was right, 
though he spoke pompously: "Time writes no 
wrinkle on thine azure brow." Every part of the 
earth's body is growing old, and shows the signs 
and scars of age ; only the sea is without that 
symptom of mortality, and remains a witness to 
the original youth of creation. 

And the land too, here has in it something 
primeval. On this height one seems to stand 
among fragments of the making of the world ; 
and, at so few hundred yards from the hotel, the 
tea-house, the picture post-cards, the brakes, and 
the motors, to be cut off from all these things by 
an impregnable barrier; alone, at the edge of the 
world, with the immovable rocks, and with the sea 
which is always moving and never removed. 

Summer, 1905. 



273 



Cornish Sketches. 



I. At Fowey. 

As I entered Fowey, the little omnibus turned and 
twisted through streets so narrow that the people 
had sometimes to get into doorways to let it pass ; 
it plunged downhill and cHmbed uphill, the driver 
blowing a whistle at certain points to clear the way ; 
I caught, in passing, glimpses of an inch or two of 
water in the narrow space between two houses, and 
came out finally upon a high terrace from which 
I could look down on the harbour with its masts, 
the exquisite curve of Polruan across the harbour, 
the wedge of green land, dividing the two branches 
of the river, and outward, around the rocks, the sea 
itself. There was not a breath of wind ; the sea 
lay as still as the harbour; the afternoon sun filled 
the air with dry heat; some yachts were coming 
in slowly, with white hulls and white sails, and a 
little boat with an orange sail passed close to the 
shore. I had felt, as the omnibus twisted in the 
narrow streets, as if I were entering Aries ; but the 
hills and valleys were new to me; and there was 
something at once new and yet slightly familiar in 
this southern heat on a little town of old houses, 
spread out along the side of a hill which runs sharply 
in from the sea, where the river comes down to make 
a natural harbour. As I walked, afterwards, along 
the roads, at that height, looking down on the sea 
through trees and tall, bright flowers and green 
foliage, I could have fancied myself in Naples, 
274 



Cornish Sketches. 

walking along the terrace-roads at Posilippo. And 
the air was as mild as the air of Naples and the sea 
as blue as the sea in the bay of Naples. It stretched 
away, under the hot sunlight, waveless to the 
horizon, scarcely lapping against the great cliffs, 
covered with green to the sea's edge. Trees grew 
in the clefts of the rock, they climbed up the hill, 
covering it with luxuriant woods ; deep country 
lanes took one inland, and the butterflies fluttered 
out of the bushes and over the edge of the clifF, 
where they met the sea-gulls, coming in from sea 
like great white butterflies. All day long the sea 
lay motionless, and the yachts went in and out of 
the harbour, and the steam-tugs brought in black, 
four-masted ships with foreign sailors, and the 
ferry-boat, rowed slowly by an old man, crawled 
across from Fowey to Polruan and from Polruan 
to Fowey. There was always, in those slow, sun- 
warmed days, a sense of something quiet, unmoved, 
in the place; and yet always a certain movement 
on the water, a passing of ships, a passing and re- 
turning of boats, the flight of sea-gulls curving 
from land to land. 

To sit at an open window or in the garden under 
an awning, and to look down on all this moving 
quiet was enough entertainment for day or night. 
I felt the same languid sense of physical comfort 
that I have felt on the coast of Spain, with the same 
disinclination to do anything, even to think, with 
any intentness. The air was full of sleep ; the 
faint noise of the water flapping on the rocks, the 

275 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

sound of voices, of oars, something in the dull 
brilHance of the water, hke the surface of a mirror, 
reflecting all the heat of the sky, came up to one 
drowsily; the boats, with white or rusty sails, 
passed like great birds or moths afloat on the water. 
On the other side, over against me, Polruan lay 
back in the arms of the hill, with its feet in the 
water ; and I was never tired of looking at Polruan. 
It seemed not so much to have been made, as to 
have grown there, like something natural to the 
rock, all its houses set as if instinctively, each in 
its own corner, with all the symmetry of accident. 
It nestled into the harbour; on the other side of 
the hill were the high cliff's and the sea. 

At night, looking across at Polruan, I could see 
a long dark mass, deep black under the shadow 
of the moon, which sharpened the outline of its 
summit against the sky; here and there a light in 
some window, and beyond, to the right, the white 
glitter of the sea. The harbour was partly in shadow 
near the further shore, and the masts of the boats, 
each with its little yellow light, plunged into the 
water, almost motionless. The nearer part of the 
river was bright, like the sea, and glittered under 
the moon. An infinity of stars clustered together 
overhead. I could hear, if I listened, a very faint 
ripple against the rocks, and at intervals two fishing- 
boats, moored together, creaked heavily. 

September 7, 1901. 
276 



Cornish Sketches. 

II. The Cornish Sea: Boscastle. 

You might pass Boscastle on the sea and not 
know that a harbour lay around a certain corner of 
rocks. This twisting way in from the sea gives 
something stealthy to the aspect of the place, as if 
a secret harbour had been prepared for smugglers. 
Few boats go in or out there now ; rarely a pleasure- 
boat, more often a rowing-boat on its way to the 
lobster-pots. Green hills rise up steeply on both 
sides of the harbour, and a wooded valley follows 
the course of the little river flowing between them. 
The village is built around a single long, precipitous 
street, which winds uphill from the old bridge over 
the river, where you might stand looking seawards, 
and see nothing but two folding arms of rock that 
seem to overlap and make a barrier. Beyond the 
village the land still rises, and, looking across at 
it from the cliffs, it seems to nestle deep into the 
valley, a little white streak in the midst of green 
fields and green woods. From the higher part 
of the village you can catch glimpses of the sea 
across harvest fields or beyond Forrabury Church 
with its brown and white grave-stones. 

Boscastle tantalises one, if one loves the sea for 
its own sake, by the height at which it sets one 
above the water. From these cliffs one sees, seeming 
to be close under one, the whole Atlantic; only it 
is three hundred feet below, perhaps, and there is 
not a beach or strip of sand on which to get level 
with it. Here and there are rocks on which it is 

277 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

just possible to clamber down at low tide; there is 
a tiny cove or two, hard to reach at the best of times, 
and at high tide under water; but this side of 
Trebarwith, which is a couple of miles beyond 
Tintagel, only a single sandy bay. Even at Trebar- 
with the sand is covered at high tide, but when 
the water is out there is a long broad road of yellow 
sand, leading from the low rocks at one end of the 
bay to the caverns in the high rocks at the other end 
of the bay. On a hot almost still day, the waves, 
coming towards the shore in long thin lines white 
with foam, are blown into fine dust as they curve 
over. Seen from the sand, they can be watched 
at more stages of their movement than from the 
cliffs, where one gets only the final leap at the 
rocks. 

At Boscastle the sea is almost always in move- 
ment, tossing restlessly, leaping at the rocks, whiten- 
ing around them, flecked here and there with white, 
and the whole sea moves, as if the depths under it 
moved too. Even when there is not wind enough 
to ridge the water into separate waves, some energy 
seems to shoulder up through the surface and push 
for shore. When the wind urges it, it heaves into 
great billows, that rise up green and tilt over with 
a little burst of white, and roll one over another 
towards the shore, and as they come into a space 
of curdHng foam, curdle, and turn to foam, and 
leap suddenly at the rocks, and hammer at them 
with a loud voluminous softness, and fall back like 
a blown cataract, every drop distinct in the sunlight. 
278 



Cornish Sketches. 

It is as if a dome of whiteness sprang into the air 
and fell over with a crash of all its architecture of 
bubbles. Sometimes two columns of foam meet in 
the air, and pass through one another like a ghost 
through a ghost. Sometimes a great wave springs 
higher at the rocks, seems to take hold there, and 
then falls back, broken into spray, while the rock 
streams steadily; and then, after a pause, a thin 
white smoke-drift, incredibly thin and white, like 
the reflection of smoke in a glass, is blown far out 
from some corner or crevice in the rock that had 
sucked the water deep into it. 

I am content to sit on the rocks, as near as I can 
to the water, and watch a few feet of sea for an hour 
together. There is enough entertainment in its 
recurrent and changing violence and stealthiness of 
approach, its unexhausted and unnumbered varieties 
of attack, the foam and disappointment of its foiled 
retreats. Form and colour change at every instant, 
and, if they return again, one is not conscious of 
the repetition. I suppose many waves are identical 
out of the infinite number of waves which break 
on any point of shore. But some happy accident 
of wind or tide or sunlight seems always to bring 
in its own variation. 

At sunset the sea warms and lightens into strange 
colours. As the sun goes down in a ball of intense 
fire, the round seems to flatten itself out to a long, 
glowing bar, scorching the sea under it ; a pale 
sunset leaves the sea chill, grey, uncoloured. The 
shadow of golden fire in the sky turns it to lavender ; 

279 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

a sunset of paler fire burnishes it into glittering steel, 
or it lies like a steel mirror misted by a breath. 
Every sunset here is a marvel, and the sea is a shining 
floor on which the marvel is built up. I remember 
a particular sunset after a day on which the rain had 
poured continuously; the sun sank slowly behind 
wet and shining clouds, through which it shone 
like a light in a crystal. These white clouds rose 
out of the sea, and their peaked and jagged upper 
edges gradually shone into bright gold as the sun 
sank lower behind them. Above, between them 
and the darker clouds still swollen with rain, a 
horizontal bar of gold glittered more faintly; and 
across the darker clouds a mist of rosy fire began to 
drift away, flushed softly like the feathers of a 
flaming wing; and this rosy mist floated onwards 
until it came to the edge of the furthest rain-clouds, 
and drooped over a space of pale green sky, clear, 
luminous, and transparent. The sea was the 
colour of lilac deepening into rose, and it lay like 
a field of heather washed by the rain, when the sun 
shines into every rain-drop. 

There is a point at Trevalga where I like to look 
along the shore as it bends in an irregular curve, 
rising sharply out of the water in a series of torn 
and uneven crags, with, at some interval, the two 
high and steep rocks which rise up out of the sea 
some hundreds of yards away from the land, from 
which they had once been rent. The sea washes 
around the rocks and against the bases of the cliff's 
as far as the distant, smoother line of coast towards 
280 



Cornish Sketches. 

Bude, where the Cornish wildness dies away, and 
it Hes out towards the sky as far as the eye can fol- 
low it, an infinite space of unwearied water. Seen 
from a lower point, the cHfFs are mountainous, and 
stand often against the sky like a mountain crowned 
by a castle. Tall cliff^s covered to nearly the sea's 
edge by short grass and heather are indented by 
gullies, hollowed out of their very substance, and 
opening on the sea through a narrow and cornered 
entrance. The whole land seems to have been 
sheared into and sliced away at frequent intervals, 
and the colour of the rock varies in each, from slate 
to deep black. For the most part the rocks are 
made up of layers of slate, shale above shale, and 
they are cracking away and crumbling over con- 
tinually; the sea picks at their bases, and hollows 
out caves and holes and niches ; they stand straight 
up out of the sea, still impregnable, like great walls, 
black and jagged, and veined with yellow marble, 
and patched here and there with streaks of living 
green. They stand highest at Beeny High ClifF, 
a sheer wall of blackness, and St, Gennys, which 
rises less abruptly to a higher point. To the south- 
west one can see the wavering line of the coast as 
far as Trevose Head ; to the north-east a less rugged 
line of cliffs curves into tiny bays, each with its 
handful of grey sand, as far as the point of Cambeak. 
Bracken growing intermingled with yellow gorse 
gives colour to a wild expanse of green moorland ; 
the steep grey cliffs rise to the moorland out of a 
sea which should be seen, as I have seen it, not less 

281 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

desolately grey, with a grey sky overhead. There 
was a bitter wind blowing, which caught at one 
furiously as one came to the edge of the cliff. As 
the sun sank lower, it began to scorch the dark 
clouds about it, shrivelling their edges ragged; 
it went down into the sea rapidly, half hidden 
behind the clouds ; and the sea darkened to a sullen 
colour, as of molten lead, that spread gradually 
over its whole surface. A vivid and stormy dark- 
ness hung overhead, weighing heavily on land and 
sea. Down below the sea roared with a loud and 
continuous noise. There was something disquieting 
in the air, in the aspect of things. Long after the 
sun had gone down into the water a bright flame 
licked up the lowest edge of sky, and ran there, as 
I walked homewards, like travelling fire behind the 
bushes and tree-trunks. 

September 14, 1901. 



III. The Cornish Coast^ 

I wonder if there is any form of the mere accept- 
ance of happiness, more perfect, more explicit 
than that which I have been enjoying until some 
uneasy energy within drives me to shatter it by 
analysis ? I have been lying back on a high cliff 
between Kennack Bay and Cadgwith, on a bed of 
grass and heather, with my back against a rock 
warmed by the sun; the sun's shadow, as it sets, 
282 



Cornish Sketches. 

is slowly creeping over the grass at my feet ; there 
is a slight breeze, which I can just feel on my cheek, 
but which is not nimble enough to stir the sea into 
more than a faint criss-cross of lines, which melt 
into one another before the eye has distinguished 
one from the other, and go on wavering, level to 
the horizon. Two white sails flicker near the shore ; 
further out there are ships with white sails, a long 
dark steamer, and, almost on the horizon, a thin 
dark trail of smoke. Sea-gulls bark over my head 
and laugh in their throats, as they sail on level 
wings, the dark tips feeling their way in the sea of 
air like the rudders of white ships. The waves 
flash on the rocks below, with a gentle and sleepy 
sound, and I can hear nothing else except that 
rustle which the wind makes in the ferns and bracken 
as it passes over them. 

If I lift my head and look to the right I see the 
southern point of the Lizard, with its white telegraph 
poles ; if I look to the left I see the deep curve and 
long straight line of the cliff's ending far out at 
Black Head. Looking inland, I can see nothing 
but varying levels and varying shades of green, 
with darker trees in lines and clusters against the 
sky, beyond the fields and the downs. But if I lie 
still and do not raise or turn my head, I have enough 
for my pleasure in looking straight across the sea 
to the sky, letting sails or sea-gulls or clouds pass 
like illusions of movement in a world which has 
become stationary and which flows continually 
past me, as my eyes rest on the motionless diamond- 

283 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

like barrier of the sky and on the moving and 
changeless grey-blue pavement of the sea. 

The sea, alone of natural things, obeys Aristotle's 
law in art, that for perfect pleasure there must be 
continual slight variety. It has the monotony of 
great art, and its continual slight variety. Every- 
thing else in nature wearies one by its stillness or 
its restlessness ; by a limit which suggests constraint 
or by an open bareness which is but lawless and 
uncultured. But here the eye travels easily on to 
heaven ; there is only that diamond barrier of sky 
between it and the end of the world. And the 
world itself seems no longer to have a limit ; and, 
by these gentle degrees, infinity itself loses its 
horror. Only, as I lie here, I think none of these 
thoughts, which are but after-thoughts in the wake 
of sensation, and perhaps explain nothing; and in 
my acceptance of happiness I am hardly even con- 
scious that to be thus, in body and mind, is to be 
perfectly happy. 

If I could choose a place to build a cottage, 
where I could come and live when I wanted to be 
alone, a place for work and dreams, I would choose 
Kennack Bay, because there the land mingles more 
happily with the sea and the rocks with the sand, 
and the cliffs with the moorland than anywhere 
that I know in England. All along the coast here, 
from Kennack to the Lizard and from the Lizard 
to MulHon, there is little that has been spoilt by 
modern progress, little of the fretfulness, pretence, 
and vulgar crowding of so much of the English 
284 



Cornish Sketches. 

sea-coast. Fortunately Cornwall is a long way 
from London, half hidden in the sea, at the very 
end of the land, and the poisonous trail of the rail- 
way has not yet gone all over it. Here there is 
not a railway within ten miles. There is valley, 
moorland, and cliff; the smell of heather mingles 
with the sea-smell, and the cornfields go down 
green and golden to the sea. If one goes inland, 
roads wind up and down between deep hedges, 
and, as one comes to the top of a hill, in the moment 
before one goes down on the other side, there is a 
glimpse of the sea between the branches of trees, 
or coming blue and shining into a frame of meadow 
and clifFside. Following the whited stones of the 
coastguards, one can trace the whole coast-line, on 
narrow paths high above the sea and across the sand 
or pebbles of coves. And there is not a cliff where 
one cannot lie down and be alone, and smell salt 
and honey, and watch the flight of the sea-gulls, 
and listen to the sea, and be very idly happy. 

Yet, to me, Kennack is the most restful and 
beautiful corner of the coast and the most enviable 
to live in. Not long ago there was a plot against 
its peace, and a gang of company-promoters had 
schemed to build a big hotel there, and the plans 
were made, and only the formality of buying the 
piece of land remained. What happened is what 
still happens in these parts, where Cornish gentlemen 
still own and still keep their incomparable share of 
Cornish land. The plot was scattered by a brief, 
irrevocable letter from Lord Falmouth's agent, 

285 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and the company-promoters were left gasping at 
the modern anomaly of a landowner who would not 
part with his land for a profit. 

And the people, too, in their measure, help the 
land owners to keep Cornwall for the Cornish. 
They do not encourage strangers ; they are not at 
the beck and call of every one with a purse in his 
pocket ; they reserve their opinions and their 
independence. There is a motor-car now running 
between Helston, where the railway ends, and the 
Lizard, where the land itself ends in the Atlantic. 
The people about here say that the motor-car is 
doing them more harm than good : it is destroying 
their roads, raising their rates, and disturbing their 
peace and quiet. They have no keen desire to 
make more money or to change the conditions 
under which their fathers have lived. In the hands 
of such landowners and of such tenants is not part 
at least of Cornwall still safe ? 

August 27, 1904. 

IV. St. Levan. 

On the way from the Land's End to the Logan 
Rock, just in from the clifF, after you have passed 
Tol-Pedn, and immediately before the road drops 
to Porthgwarra, there is a little valley, a big grassy 
nook, with one cottage, a rectory, and a church. 
This is the Parish Church of St. Levan, a fisherman 
saint of whom there are many legends ; his path is 
286 



Cornish Sketches. 

still seen by the track of greener grass that leads 
out to the rocks named after him, where he fished 
the traditional "chack-cheeld" chad. There is 
his stone, too, in the churchyard, one of those 
ominous stones which, in Cornwall, are thought to 
be the dials of Time itself, chroniclers of the hour 
of the Last Judgment. The Levan stone is a rock 
of granite, split in two, with grass and ferns growing 
in the gap between the two halves. The end of 
the world will come, says the rhyme, when the gap 
is wide enough for a pack-horse with panniers to 
pass through. "We do nothing to hasten it," 
the rector said to me reassuringly. 

All that you can see of the church until you are 
quite close to it are the four pinnacles of its squat 
tower, like the legs and castors of an arm-chair 
turned upside down. It is hidden away in its 
hollow, out of the wind which is always coming and 
going on the wildest clifFs in Cornwall. Boulders 
piled with a sort of solid ricketiness on one another's 
shoulders (so old and grey and flighty !) cHmb 
the clifFside out of the sea, or stand propped and 
buttressed, holding on to the shelving edges of 
green land. Some are bare, some clothed with 
lichen as with a delicate green fur, and they lie 
about in fantastic attitudes, as if they had been flung 
together in the games of giants, and then forgotten 
for a few centuries. There is, in these clusters of 
vast rocks, that "delight in disorder" which 
Herrick knew in petty and lovely things ; only 
here it is on the scale of giants. The pale colours 

287 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

of the lichen soften what might otherwise be harshly- 
jagged, rounding the edges and dressing the naked- 
ness of the rocks. And the air, in which the scent 
of heather and gorse and thyme mingles with the 
salt smell of the sea, is tempered and made more 
exquisite by the drifting mists and vapours which 
come up out of the sea like a ghostly presence, and 
blot out headland after headland, as by a soft 
enchantment. 

Inland there is barren moor, with here and there 
a scanty plot of herbage; and the moorland is all 
patterned out into squares and oblongs by the stone 
hedges which mark each man's property, little 
properties of gorse, grass, stones, and perhaps a 
patch of heather, meaningless as nought without 
a cipher, but held jealously from father to son. 
The skylarks have their nests in this rocky ground, 
and you hear them singing in the air their ecstatic 
hymns to light, while, below them, the sea-gulls 
drift to and fro between land and sea, crying their 
harsh and melancholy and complaining cry, the 
voice of restlessness, the voice of the restlessness 
of water. 

It is in the midst of this eager and barren world, 
where only a few fishers live here and there in the 
creeks and coves, that the little church is hidden 
away in its green nook, like a relic of other ages. 
It is built in the Late Perpendicular style, and has 
fine heavy pillars, painted beams in the roof, an 
early font of some green granite, unknown in 
Cornwall. But it is chiefly for its carved woodwork 
288 



Cornish Sketches. 

that the church is notable. The screen, carved 
thickly to the very beads of the mouldings, contains 
a whole homily in wood, a minute system of Catholic 
symbolism, in which the spiritual history of the 
world from the Creation to the Passion is imaged. 
There are the legged snakes of the first Eden, fiery 
flying serpents, symbols of the Trinity, the pelican, 
the Virgin's lily, the eagle of St. John; the sacred 
monogram is repeated continually, and there are 
the nail, the hammer, the spear, all the instruments 
of the Crucifixion; and there is an effigy of the 
Virgin, who is represented with a foolish round face, 
coiff'ed hair, necklace, and rufF, like a fine lady of 
the period. The carvings on the ends of the pews 
are less naive, more skilful. There are the two 
fishes of St. Levan; the two cocks that crowed in 
answer to one another when St. Peter denied his 
Master; there is a palmer, with a cockle-shell (on 
his hat ; there are knights and ladies, fierce heathen, 
and there are two jesters. One of the jesters is 
supposed to typify Good, because he looks to the 
east smilingly, holding his cap and bells and ladle; 
while the other typifies Evil, because he turns his 
back on the altar, and holds askew a bishop's cro- 
zier with an ass's hoof for crook. All are carved 
patiently and livingly by carvers to whom the work 
was part of religion. "The soul of a man is in it," 
said the rector. 

The learned and kindly rector told me, among 
many stories of his lonely parish, that there had been 
a rector once whose wits were none of the soundest, 

289 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and, as they were liable to come and go with violence, 
he would be chained to his lectern when it was 
thought they were likely to leave him, so that he 
might read the Lessons without danger to his 
congregation. In Cornwall madness is no un- 
common thing, and, like deformity, is looked on 
kindly. Most villages have their village idiot, or 
one of those large-skulled dwarfs who trudge pain- 
fully along the lanes with aged faces. 

August 19, 1905. 

V. The Colours of Cornwall. 

The postman comes to me once a morning from 
Ruan Minor, and asks if I have any letters to be 
posted. If I go into the little shop of all sorts, 
which is the post office as well, half an hour before 
post time, I find him helping to sort the letters 
behind the grocery counter. Ruan Minor is a 
village without a street. Most of the cottages 
are built by the roadside, some turn aside from the 
road, along lanes of their own, and are built cross- 
wise or around corners, to suit the natural angles. 
Almost all are thatched, and have flower gardens 
in front and creepers up the wall. One cottage 
is built of corrugated iron, which is almost hidden 
by trails of purple clematis. There is only one 
shop besides the post office, though the shoemaker 
and the blacksmith and the carpenter have each a 
shanty. There is a church, and there are two 
290 



Cornish Sketches. 

chapels ; but there is not a pubhc-house in the 
village. 

The cottage where I am staying is down in the 
valley, and to get to it you must go down an in- 
credibly steep and winding hill, I have once seen 
a horse and cart go up that hill ; I have never seen 
one come down. If you stop half-way, where there 
is a cottage, and look across under the branches of 
the trees, you will see a triangular patch of blue sea, 
and, forming one side of the triangle, the high 
straight cliffs going out to Pedn Boar. Between you 
and the water there is a high rocky croft, and when 
you go down into the valley you will see nothing 
but steep walls of green on all sides, which seem at 
night to be built half-way to the stars, shutting out 
the sea and the winds, and sheltering the valley. 

On the hill behind the cottage there is another 
village, Kuggar, or, as the people call it, Kigger. 
It is smaller than Ruan Minor, and has no post 
office, only a pillar-box, which is cleared once a 
day; no shop and no church. A steep road passes 
through it which leads down to Kennack Bay, 
winding between low hedges ; on the further side 
there is another valley, with sloping corn-fields, 
scarred by waste rocky places which no plough can 
pass over, and green meadows where cattle graze; 
and then, beyond the first stretch of sand, yet 
another valley, like a hollow cut out of the solid 
earth, and now grown over with a soft multitude 
of trees and gorse and heather, which rise into 
rocks and drop to a stream flowing between reeds 

291 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

on the edge of the sand. Beyond, in the eastern 
bay, there is another valley, and then the cliffs 
begin, and go on across rocky plains of heather to 
Coverack, where they turn bare, and so on to 
Pedn Boar and Black Head. The coast here, 
seen from Kennack, is at once violent and soft, at 
once wild and placid, with its broad outlines and 
delicacy of detail, the variety of its colour, form, 
and mingled rock and pasturage. Here things are 
constantly falling into pictures ; nature here, though 
opulent, is by no means indiscriminate. And it is 
this touch of reticence, this fine composition, this 
natural finesse, that saves a country so picturesque 
from the reproach of an obvious picturesqueness : 
these soft gradations, this mastery of fine shades, 
nature's surprising tact in refraining from her 
favourite effects of emphasis. 

If, instead of turning to the right as you go 
through Kuggar, you turn to the left and follow 
a flat road going inland, you will come out presently 
upon the downs. The road divides by the double 
cottage where the four dogs sit in their four barrels 
under the signpost ; one way will take you across 
the downs to Mullion or the Lizard, and the other 
way will take you to Helston, or, if you turn aside 
from it, to a multitude of places with strange names, 
Constantine, Bosahan, or St. Anthony in Meneage. 
There is a walk from Gillan Creek, by the quaint 
little church of St. Anthony, along the edge of the 
cliff to Helford, which, in its mingling of sea and 
river and forest, its rocks and sandy coves and 
292 



Cornish Sketches. 

luxuriant vegetation, is unlike an5rthing I have seen 
in England. Leaving Dennis Head, from which 
you can see Falmouth across the curve of the sea, 
and following the broad Helford River by the 
rabbit-warrens, you go, by a public path, along the 
margin of the grounds of Bosahan, where woods 
carpeted with ferns come down to the sea's edge, and 
narrow paths lead up between clustering hydrangeas 
and exotic plants and grasses and tall bamboos, which 
grow there exuberantly, as if in their native soil. 

I am never tired of walking and driving across 
the downs, though they are empty of shape, except 
where a barrow heaves them or a pool lies among 
reeds by the roadside. They are coloured with 
the white and purple of heather and with the yellow 
of gorse, and a wind from the sea passes over them 
and goes on to the sea. You can see the sea towards 
Cadgwith on one side of Cornwall and the Marconi 
posts at Mullion on the other side of Cornwall. 
And at night there are marvellous sunsets, filling 
the whole breadth of the sky and building up 
delicate patterns there, in colours like the colours 
of flowers transfigured by light. 

It is for its colour, largely, that I love Cornwall, 
and wherever you walk, on moorland, croft, meadow, 
or cliffside, there is a continual soft insistence and 
alternation of colour. On the downs the heather 
grows sparely, and is less like a carpet of Eastern 
weaving than on the cliffs beyond Kennack, where 
one's feet tread upon colours and scents, and all the 
ground is in bloom. Grey rocks come up amongst 

293 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

these soft coverings, and go down, tufted with the 
elastic green and faint yellow of samphire into the 
sea ; and the rocks are spotted with lichen of violent 
gold, which is almost orange. Everywhere there 
is the sharp white of cottage walls and the gentle 
browns and greys of thatch ; flowers of all colours 
swarm against the whitewash, and creepers catch 
at the eaves and nod in at the windows — red, white, 
purple, and yellow. White sea-gulls with their 
brown young ones fly out over the water in circles ; 
cormorants sit like black weather-cocks, each on a 
solitary point of rock; inland, the crows cut black 
patterns on the sky; the grey sandpipers run over 
the grey sand. And there are the many colours 
of sand, sulphurous and salmon-coloured rocks, 
painted rocks, with all the intricate colourings of 
serpentine ; and there is the sea, with its warm blue, 
when it seems almost human, and its chill green, 
when it seems fairy, and its white foam of delight, 
and the misery of its grey dwindling away into mist. 
Autumn is beginning : the bracken is shriveHing 
brown, and the heather darkening, and the gorse 
drying to dust and flowering yellow, and the grasses 
withering, and the leaves of the trees yellowing 
and falling. The corn has all been carried, and 
stands, golden beside the pale hay, in great solemn 
ricks in the farmyards. All the green things of 
the earth begin to brighten a little before they fade. 

October 8, 1904. 

294 



In a Northern Bay. 

I HAVE only seen the bay when the sea has been 
gentle, at the most whitening a little against the 
yellow sand, into a sliding pattern like white lace. 
At sunrise, a steel mirror, coloured at sunset with 
more sombre lights, half deep shadow and half 
chilled into whiteness under moonlight, the sea 
lies there before one, filling one's eyes, as if there 
were nothing else in the world but changing and 
unchangeable water. Between the sea and the low 
bank on which the village has grouped itself, there 
is a narrow strip of sand, ending on one side in a 
curve of rocks and a sandy cliflF, and on the other 
in a little rocky point running out into the sea, with 
its old church, its few, huddled cottages, the fishing- 
boats drawn up against it. Half-way along the 
naked ribs of a wreck clutch the sand, where a 
storm drove them deep into it. Cobles lie eagerly 
on the sand, with their delicately curved keels, 
waiting, like impatient horses, to race into the sea. 
Beyond the point lie miles of green moorland, along 
which you can follow the sea into other bays, which it 
does but drift into and drift out of, indifferent to 
the land, which has here no hold upon it, as it seems 
to stretch out ineffectual arms. 

Between the house and the sea there is only a 
slope of grass and the narrow beach. The little 
world of the place passes to and fro under our eyes 
along the narrow beach; the fishing-boats and the 
yachts go out over the sea ; nothing ever changes ; 
there are always the same faces and the same sails. 

295 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Only the sea changes continually, like music, visible 
cadence after cadence. One seems to live with 
dulled senses, fantastically awake under a sort of 
exterior sleep, as if hypnotised by the sea. There 
is something terrible in so much peace. It is 
impossible that any one could be so sleepily happy 
as one ought to be here. 

The sea is a mirror, not only to the clouds, the 
sun, the moon, and the stars, but to all one's dreams, 
to all one's speculations. The room of mirrors, 
in which the Lady of Shalott wove her fate, is but 
an image of the sea's irresistible imprisonment of 
oneself alone with oneself. Reflections enter from 
without, but only reflections, and these too are 
dimmed into the shadowy life of the mirror. The 
sea tells us that everything is changing and that 
nothing ever changes, that tides go out and return, 
that all existence is a rhythm; neither calm nor 
storm breaks the rhythm, only hastens or holds it 
back for a moment ; all agitation being but a tempo 
ruhato. Mountains give hope, woods a kind of 
mysterious friendliness with the earth, but the sea 
reminds us that we are helpless. In cities we can 
escape thought, we can deaden feeling, we can 
forget that yesterday mattered or that to-morrow 
will matter. But the sea has no compromises, no 
evasions, none of the triviality of meadows among 
which we can be petty without sufi^ering rebuke. 
The sea is austere, implacable, indifferent; it has 
nothing to tell us ; it is an eternal question. It 
comes seeming to offer us peace, a lullaby, sleep; 
296 



In a Northern Bay. 

but it is the sleep of a narcotic, never quite releasing 
us from consciousness ; and it is there always before 
us, like the narcotic, with the fascination of death 
itself. 

Yet, as ecstasy is only possible to one who is 
conscious of the possibility of despair, so the sea, 
as it detaches us from the world and our safeguards 
and our happy forgetfulnesses, and sets us by 
ourselves, as momentary as the turn of a wave, and 
mattering hardly more to the universe, gives us, if 
we will take them, moments of almost elemental 
joy. The salt taste of the sea-wind, the soft en- 
veloping touch of the water, the little voice whisper- 
ing among the rocks, the wings of a sea-gull, rigid 
in the fierce abandonment of flight, the caress of 
the sand upon one's feet as one walks slowly at 
night under a great vault of darkness : these, 
surely, are some of the few flawless sensations which 
merely animal pleasure can give us. Happiness, 
no doubt, would be to put off our souls, as one puts 
off an uneasy garment, and enjoy these things as 
it would then be possible to enjoy them. Or do 
we, after all, feel them more keenly, since more 
consciously, for the moment, because they are not 
our inner life, but a release from our inner life ? 

September 22, 1900. 



297 



Winchelsea: An Aspect. 

We saw the pure lean harsh 
Maid's body of the marsh, 
Without one curve's caress 
In the straight daintiness 
Of its young frugal fine 
Economy of Hne, 
In faultless beauty lie 
Naked under the sky. 
Naked it lay and still, 
Awaiting what new thrill 
Of the ever-amorous light 
In that austere delight ? 

That, at least, v^as the question I asked myself as 
I looked down from the highest garden in Win- 
chelsea, that famous garden which has taken in 
part of the old town-gate, and seems to set you on 
a pinnacle and show you all the glory of the world. 
There was an expectancy throughout all the empti- 
ness of the pale, delicate, and severe plain which 
lay there between the rock on which I stood and the 
sea. It was waiting for the sun to envelop, intoxi- 
cate, overwhelm it. 

There is no other aspect quite like that aspect in 
England, and it was with difficulty that I realised 
myself to be in England. Across the marsh was 
Rye, piled up and embattled on its rock like Siena, 
with sharp red edges. The seashore might have 
been Rimini, only there were no Apennines going 
down fiercely into the sea. The meadows, white 
flat roads winding through them, the glimpses of 
water, of masts, of sails, of black rigging ; the cows 
moving so formally through these meadows, in the 
298 



Winchelsea. 

midst of these tokens of the sea ; all formed them- 
selves into a picture, and I felt that one could gaze 
down on it always with the same surprise at its 
being there. It was so improbable and so beautiful. 

All Winchelsea is like a picture, and has other 
suggestions of Italy, as one looks down a brief 
street between old houses, as one does in the Alban 
hill-towns, and sees another Campagna, more 
wonderful than the Roman, because the sea com- 
pletes it. From Frascati one only sees Rome. 

Winchelsea is built in squares and at right 
angles. It is formal and self-sufficient, neither 
town nor village, guarding one of the loveliest of 
ruins, but without the general quaint ancientness 
of Rye ; a comfortable place, with trees and fields 
everywhere, with hardly any streets, hardly an 
ugly building, hardly a shop. One climbs to it 
as to a casket set on a hill; it seems to await the 
visitor like a conscious peasant in costume ; to live 
in it would be like living in a museum. How much 
longer will it remain unspoiled, when all the world 
is so set on spoiling it ? 

Though one begins by thinking of Italy, there 
are signs by which this un-English place may be 
recognised as English. There are no guides, not 
even children, and it is clean. It seems astonishing, 
so foreign are these corners, that one can loiter in 
them without reluctance. Even the old houses that 
are dropping into decay crumble gently. Every- 
where there is a discretion in things. 

There are souls in places, and places draw to 

299 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

them people made after their image. The person 
in whom I see Winchelsea may seem to have little 
in common with that windy height over the marsh 
and the glory of the world that is shown there. 
Yet that meekness and that outrageous beauty 
which are in the place would have their counterparts 
in the soul of the woman. She would live in a low 
red cottage in a side street, with no view out of any 
of the windows ; and she would be shy and reticent, 
and no one would know why she lived there all 
alone, or why it was that she seemed to be at once 
so sad and so happy. They would see a small, 
neat woman with greyish hair, who passed in the 
street hurriedly, her lips moving as if she were 
repeating something to herself, her eyes always 
wide open, the humble and hungry eyes of the 
fanatic. The backward quiet, the silence, collected- 
ness, and a certain thrill in the simplicity of the place 
would have passed into her, or seemed to find in her 
a reflection. She too will have had her ancient 
history, the romance that sometimes comes to those 
who are no longer young, and that, when it goes, 
takes everything out of life but memory. I said 
that Winchelsea is like a casket. She would have 
chosen it as a casket in which to keep her memory 
unspoiled. It has the likeness of all her recollec- 
tions, as she sees them over again, never any greyer, 
but with the heat still in them, carefully hoarded. 
She has no associations with the place, but the place 
makes associations for her grief; it shuts her 
gently in with her grief, in an unbroken leisure, 
300 



Winchelsea. 

where time seems to pause for her, in one of his 
rare intervals. It is in this hushed, aloof, eager, 
and remembering figure that I see the likeness of 
Winchelsea. 

October 13, 1906. 



301 



The Islands of Aran. 

For two hours and a half the fishing-boat had been 
running before the wind, as a greyhound runs, in 
long leaps ; and when I set foot on shore at Bally- 
vaughan, and found myself in the little, neat hotel, 
and waited for tea m the room with the worn piano, 
the album of manuscript verses, and the many 
photographs of the young girl who had written 
them, first as she stands holding a violin, and then, 
after she has taken vows, in the white habit of the 
Dominican order, I seemed to have stepped out 
of some strange, half-magical, almost real dream, 
through which I had been consciously moving on 
the other side of that grey, disturbed sea, upon 
those grey and peaceful islands in the Atlantic. 
And all that evening, as we drove for hours along 
the Clare coast and inland into Galway, under a 
sunset of gold fire and white spray until we reached 
the battlemented towers of Tillyra Castle, I had 
the same curious sensation of having been dreaming; 
and I could but vaguely remember the dream, in 
which I was still, however, absorbed. We passed, 
I believe, a fine slope of grey mountains, a ruined 
abbey, many castle ruins ; we talked of Parnell, 
of the county families, of mysticism, the analogy of 
that old Biblical distinction of body, soul, and spirit 
with the symbolical realities of the lamp, the wick, 
and the flame; and all the time I was obsessed by 
the vague, persistent remembrance of those vanishing 
islands, which wavered somewhere in the depths of 
my consciousness. When I awoke next morning 
302 



The Islands of Aran. 

the dream had resolved itself into definite shape, 
and I remembered every detail of those last three 
days, during which I had been so far from civilisa- 
tion, so much further out of the world than I had 
ever been before. 

It was on the morning of Wednesday, August 5, 
1896,. that a party of four, of whom I alone was not 
an Irishman, got into Tom Joyce's hooker at 
Cashla Bay, on the coast of Galway, and set sail for 
the largest of the three islands of Aran, Inishmore 
by name, that is, Large Island. The hooker, a 
half-decked, cutter-rigged fishing-boat of seventeen 
tons, had come over for us from Aran, and we set 
out with a light breeze, which presently dropped 
and left us almost becalmed under a very hot sun 
for nearly an hour, where we were passed by a 
white butterfly that was making straight for the 
open sea. We were nearly four hours in crossing, 
and we had time to read all that needed reading of 
Grania, Miss Emily Lawless's novel, which is 
supposed to be the classic of the islands, and to study 
our maps and to catch one mackerel. But I found 
most to my mind this passage from Roderic 
O 'Flaherty's Choro graphical Description of West or 
H-Iar Connaughty which in its quaint, minute 
seventeenth-century prose told me more about 
what I was going to see than everything else that 
I read then or after on the subject of these islands. 
"The soile," he tells us, "is almost paved over 
with stones, soe as, in some places, nothing is to 
be seen but large stones with wide openings between 

303 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

them, where cattle break their legs. Scarce any 
other stones there but limestones, and marble fit 
for tombstones, chymney mantle trees, and high 
crosses. Among these stones is very sweet pasture, 
so that beefe, veal, mutton are better and earlyer 
in season here than elsewhere; and of late there 
is plenty of cheese, and tillage mucking, and corn 
is the same with the seaside tract. In some places 
the plow goes. On the shores grows samphire 
in plenty, ring-root or sea-holy, and sea-cabbage. 
Here are Cornish choughs, with red legs and bills. 
Here are ayries of hawkes, and birds which never 
fly but over the sea, and, therefore, are used to be 
eaten on fasting days : to catch which people goe 
down, with ropes tyed about them, into the caves 
of cliffs by night, and with a candle light kill abund- 
ance of them. Here are severall wells and pooles, 
yet in extraordinary dry weather, people must turn 
their cattell out of the islands, and the corn failes. 
They have noe fuell but cow-dung dryed with the 
sun, unless they bring turf in from the western 
continent. They have Cloghans, a kind of building 
of stones iayd one upon another, which are brought 
to a roof without any manner of mortar to cement 
them, some of which cabins will hold forty men 
on their floor; so antient that nobody knows how 
long ago any of them was made. Scarcity of wood 
and store of fit stones, without peradventure found 
out the first invention." Reading of such things 
as these, and of how St. Albeus, Bishop of Imly, had 
said, "Great is that island, and it is the land of saints ; 
304 



The Islands of Aran. 

for no man knows how many saints are buried there, 
but God alone"; and of an old saying: "Athenry 
was, Galway is, Aran shall be the best of the three," 
we grew, after a while, impatient of delay. A 
good breeze sprang up at last, and as I stood in the 
bow, leaning against the mast, I felt the one quite 
perfectly satisfying sensation of movement : to race 
through steady water before a stiff sail, on which 
the reefing cords are tapping in rhythm to those 
nine notes of the sailors' chorus in Tristan, which 
always ring in my ears when I am on the sea, for 
they have in them all the exultation of all life that 
moves upon the waters. 

The butterfly, I hope, had reached land before 
us ; but only a few sea-birds came out to welcome 
us as we drew near Inishmore, the Large Island, 
which is nine miles long and a mile and a half broad. 
I gazed at the long line of the island, growing more 
distinct every moment ; first, a grey outline, flat 
at the sea's edge, and rising up beyond in irregular, 
rocky hills, terrace above terrace; then, against 
this grey outHne, white houses began to detach 
themselves, the sharp line of the pier cutting into 
the curve of the harbour; and then, at last, the 
figures of men and women moving across the land. 
Nothing is more mysterious, more disquieting, than 
one's first glimpse of an island, and all I had heard 
of these islands, of their peace in the heart of the 
storm, was not a little mysterious and disquieting. 
I knew that they contained the oldest ruins and 
that their life of the present was the most primitive 

305 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

life of any part of Ireland ; I knew that they were 
rarely visited by the tourist, almost never by any 
but the local tourist ; that they were difficult to 
reach, sometimes more difficult to leave, for the 
uncertainty of weather in that uncertain region of 
the Atlantic had been known to detain some of 
the rare travellers there for days, was it not for 
weeks ? Here one was absolutely at the mercy of 
the elements, which might at any moment become 
unfriendly, which, indeed, one seemed to have but 
apprehended in a pause of their eternal enmity. 
And we seemed also to be venturing among an 
unknown people, who, even if they spoke our own 
language, were further away from us, more foreign 
than people who spoke an unknown language and 
lived beyond other seas. 

As we walked along the pier towards the three 
whitewashed cottages which form the Atlantic 
Hotel, at which we were to stay, a strange being 
sprang towards us, with a curiously beast-like 
stealthiness and animation ; it was a crazy man, 
bare-footed and blear-eyed, who held out his hand 
and sang out at us in a high, chanting voice, and in 
what sounded rather a tone of command than of 
entreaty, "Give me a penny, sir!' Give me a 
penny, sir ! " We dropped something into his 
hat, and he went away over the rocks, laughing 
loudly to himself, and repeating some words that 
he had heard us say. We passed a few fishermen 
and some bare-footed children, who looked at us 
curiously, but without moving, and were met at 
306 



The Islands of Aran. 

the door of the middle cottage by a Httle, fat old 
woman with a round body and a round face, wearing 
a white cap tied over her ears. The Atlantic Hotel 
is a very primitive hotel; it had last been slept in 
by some priests from the mainland, who had come 
on their holiday with bicycles ; and before that 
by a German philologist who was learning Irish. 
The kitchen, which is also the old landlady's bed- 
room, presents a medley of pots and pans and petti- 
coats as you pass its open door and climb the little 
staircase, diverging oddly on either side after the 
first five or six steps, and leading on the right to a 
large dining-room, where the table lounges on an 
inadequate number of legs and the chairs bow over 
when you lean back on them. I have slept more 
luxuriously, but not more soundly, than in the 
little musty bedroom on the other side of the 
stairs, with its half-made bed, its bare and unswept 
floor, its tiny window, of which only the lower half 
could be opened, and this, when opened, had to 
be supported by a wooden catch from outside. 
Going to sleep in that little, uncomfortable room 
was a delight in itself; for the starry water outside, 
which one could see through that narrow slit of 
window, seemed to flow softly about one in waves 
of delicate sleep. 

When we had had a hasty meal and had got a 
little used to our hotel, and had realised as well as 
we could where we were, at the lower end of the 
village of Kilronan, which stretches up the hill to 
the north-west on either side of the main road, we 

307 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

set out in the opposite direction, finding many- 
guides by the way, who increased in number as we 
went on through the smaller village of Kileaney 
up to the south-eastern hill, on which are a holy 
well, its thorn-tree hung with votive ribbons, and 
the ruins of several churches, among them the church 
of St. Enda, the patron saint of the island. At 
first we were able to walk along a very tolerable 
road, then we branched off upon a little strip of grey 
sand, piled in mounds as high as if it had been 
drifted snow, and from that, turning a little inland, 
we came upon the road again, which began to get 
stonier as we neared the village. Our principal 
guide, an elderly man with long thick curls of 
flaxen hair and a seaman's beard, shaved away from 
the chin, talked fairly good English, with a strong 
accent, and he told us of the poverty of the people, 
the heavy rents they have to pay for soil on which 
no grass grows, and the difficult living they make 
out of their fishing, and their little tillage, and the 
cattle which they take over in boats to the fairs at 
Galway, throwing them into the sea when they get 
near land, and leaving them to swim ashore. He 
was dressed, as are almost all the peasants of Aran, 
in clothes woven and made on the island — loose, 
rough, woollen things, of drab, or dark blue, or grey, 
sometimes charming in colour; he had a flannel 
shirt, a kind of waistcoat with sleeves, very loose 
and shapeless trousers worn without braces, an 
old and discoloured slouch hat on his head, and on 
his feet the usual pampooties, slippers of undressed 
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The Islands of Aran. 

hide, drawn together and stitched into shape, with 
pointed toes, and a cord across the instep. The 
village to which we had come was a cluster of white- 
washed cabins, a little better built than those I 
had seen in Galway, with the brown thatch fastened 
down with ropes drawn cross-wise over the roof 
and tied to wooden pegs driven into the wall for 
protection against the storm blowing in from the 
Atlantic. They had the usual two doors, facing 
each other at front and back, the windier of the 
two being kept closed in rough weather, and the 
doors were divided in half by the usual hatch. 
As we passed, a dark head would appear at the upper 
half of the door, and a dull glow of red would rise 
out of the shadow. The women of Aran almost 
all dress in red, the petticoat very heavily woven, 
the crossed shawl or bodice of a thinner texture 
of wool. Those whom we met on the roads wore 
thicker shawls over their heads, and they would 
sometimes draw the shawls closer about them, as 
women in the East draw their veils closer about 
their faces. As they came out to their doors to 
see us pass, I noticed in their manner a certain 
mingling of curiosity and shyness, an interest which 
was never quite eager. Some of the men came out 
and quietly followed us as we were led along a 
twisting way between the cabins ; and the children, 
boys and girls, in a varying band of from twenty to 
thirty, ran about our heels, stopping whenever we 
stopped, and staring at us with calm wonder. 
They were very inquisitive, but, unlike English 

309 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

villagers in remote places, perfectly polite, and 
neither resented our coming among them nor jeered 
at us for being foreign to their fashions. 

The people of Aran (they are about 3000 in 
all), as I then saw them for the first time, and as I 
saw them during the few days of my visit, seemed 
to me a simple, dignified, self-sufficient, sturdily 
primitive people, to whom Browning's phrase of 
"gentle islanders" might well be applied. They 
could be fierce on occasion, as I knew; for I 
remembered the story of their refusal to pay the 
county cess, and how, when the cess-collector had 
come over to take his dues by force, they had 
assembled on the seashore with sticks and stones, 
and would not allow him even to land. But they 
had, for the most part, mild faces, of the long Irish 
type, often regular in feature, but with loose and 
drooping mouths and discoloured teeth. Most 
had blue eyes, the men, oftener than the women, 
having fair hair. They held themselves erect, 
and walked nimbly, with a peculiar step due to 
the rocky ways they have generally to walk on; 
few of them, I noticed, had large hands or feet, 
and all, without exception, were thin, as indeed 
the Irish peasant almost invariably is. The women 
too, for the most part, were thin, and had the same 
long faces, often regular, with straight eyebrows 
and steady eyes, not readily changing expression; 
they hold themselves well, a little like men, whom, 
indeed, they somewhat resemble in figure. As I saw 
them, leaning motionless against their doors, walking 
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The Islands of Aran. 

with their dehberateness of step along the roads, 
with eyes in which there was no wonder, none of 
the fever of the senses, placid animals on whom 
emotion has never worked in any vivid or passionate 
way, I seemed to see all the pathetic contentment 
of those narrow lives, in which day follows day 
with the monotony of wave lapping on wave. I 
observed one young girl of twelve or thirteen who 
had something of the ardency of beauty, and a few 
shy, impressive faces, their hair drawn back smoothly 
from the middle parting, appearing suddenly behind 
doors or over walls ; almost all, even the very old 
women, had nobility of gesture and attitude, but 
in the more personal expression of faces there was 
for the most part but a certain quietude, seeming 
to reflect the grey hush, the bleak greyness of this 
land of endless stone and endless sea. 

When we had got through the village and 
begun to climb the hill, we were still followed, and 
we were followed for all the rest of the way by 
about fifteen youngsters, all, except one, bare- 
footed, and two, though boys, wearing petticoats, 
as the Irish peasant children not unfrequently do, 
for economy, when they are young enough not to 
resent it. Our guide, the elderly man with the 
flaxen curls, led us first to the fort set up by the 
soldiers of Cromwell, who, coming over to keep 
down the Catholic rebels, ended by turning Catholic 
and marrying and settling among the native people ; 
then to Teglach Enda, a ruined church of very early 
masonry, made of large blocks set together with 

311 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

but little cement — the church of St. Enda, who 
came to Aran in about the year 480, and fifty-eight 
years later laid his bones in the cemetery which was 
to hold the graves of not less than a hundred and 
twenty saints. On our way inland to TeampuU 
Benen, the remains of an early oratory, surrounded 
by cloghans or stone dwellings made of heaped 
stones which, centuries ago, had been the cells of 
monks, we came upon the large puffing-hole, a 
great gap in the earth, going down by steps of 
rock to the sea, which in stormy weather dashes foam 
to the height of its sixty feet, reminding me of the 
sounding hollows on the coast of Cornwall. The 
road here, as on almost the whole of the island, was 
through stone-walled fields of stone. Grass, or 
any soil, was but a rare interval between a broken 
and distracted outstretch of grey rock, lying in large 
flat slabs, in boulders of every size and shape, and 
in innumerable stones, wedged in the ground or 
lying loose upon it, round, pointed, rough, and 
polished; an unending greyness, cut into squares 
by the walls of carefully-heaped stones, which we 
climbed with great insecurity, for the stones were 
kept in place by no more than the more or less 
skilful accident of their adjustment, and would turn 
under our feet or over in our hands as we climbed 
them. Occasionally a little space of pasture had 
been cleared or a little artificial soil laid down, and 
a cow browsed on the short grass. Ferns, and 
occasionally maidenhair, grew in the fissures splin- 
tered between the rocks ; and I saw mallow, stone- 
312 



The Islands of Aran. 

crop, the pale blue wind-flower, the white campian, 
many nettles, ivy, and a few bushes. In this part 
of the island there were no trees, which were to be 
found chiefly on the north-western side, in a few 
small clusters about some of the better houses, and 
almost wholly of alder and willow. As we came 
to the sheer edge of the sea and saw the Atlantic, 
and knew that there was nothing but the Atlantic 
between this last shivering remnant of Europe and 
the far-off continent of America, it was with no 
feeling of surprise that we heard from the old man 
who led us that no later than two years ago an old 
woman of those parts had seen, somewhere on this 
side of the horizon, the blessed island of Tir-nan- 
Ogue, the island of immortal youth, which is held 
by the Irish peasants to lie somewhere in that 
mysterious region of the sea. 

We loitered on the cliffs for some time, leaning 
over them, and looking into the magic mirror that 
glittered there like a crystal, and with all the soft 
depth of a crystal in it, hesitating on the veiled 
threshold of visions. Since I have seen Aran and 
Sligo, I have never wondered that the Irish peasant 
still sees fairies about his path, and that the bound- 
aries of what we call the real, and of what is for us 
the unseen, are vague to him. The sea on those 
coasts is not like the sea as I know it on any other 
coast ; it has in it more of the twilight. And the 
sky seems to come down more softly, with more 
stealthy step, more illusive wings, and the land to 
come forward with a more hesitating and gradual 

313 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

approach; and land and sea and sky to mingle 
more absolutely than on any other coast. I have 
never realised less the slipping of sand through the 
hour-glass ; I have never seemed to see with so 
remote an impartiality, as in the presence of brief 
and yet eternal things, the troubling and insignificant 
accidents of life. I have never believed less in the 
reality of the visible world, in the importance of 
all we are most serious about. One seems to wash 
off the dust of cities, the dust of beliefs, the dust of 
incredulities. 

It was nearly seven o'clock when we got back to 
Kilronan, and after dinner we sat for a while talking 
and looking out through the little windows at the 
night. But I could not stay indoors in this new, 
marvellous place; and, persuading one of my 
friends to come with me, I walked up through 
Kilronan, which I found to be a far more solid and 
populous village than the one we had seen; and 
coming out on the high ground beyond the houses, 
we saw the end of a pale green sunset. Getting 
back to our hotel, we found the others still talking; 
but I could not stay indoors, and after a while went 
out by myself to the end of the pier in the darkness, 
and lay there looking into the water and into the 
fishing-boats lying close up against the land, where 
there were red lights moving, and the shadows of 
men, and the sound of deep-throated Irish. 

I remember no dreams that night, but I was told 
that I had talked in my sleep, and I was willing to 
believe it. In the morning, not too early, we set 

314 



The Islands of Aran. 

out on an outside car (that rocking and most com- 
fortable vehicle, which I prefer to everything but 
a gondola) for the Seven Churches and Dun Aengus, 
along the only beaten road in the island. The 
weather, as we started, was grey and misty, threaten- 
ing rain, and we could but just see the base-line 
of the Clare mountains across the grey and dis- 
coloured waters of the bay. At the Seven Churches 
we were joined by a peasant, who diligently showed 
us the ruined walls of Teampull Brecan, with its 
slab inscribed in Gaelic with the words, "Pray 
for the two canons"; the stone of the "VII. 
Romani"; St. Brecan's headstone, carved with 
Gaelic letters ; the carved cross and the headstone 
of St. Brecan's bed. More peasants joined us, and 
some children, who fixed on us their usual placid 
and tolerant gaze, in which curiosity contended 
with an indolent air of contentment. In all these 
people I noticed the same discreet manners that had 
already pleased me ; and once, as we were sitting 
on a tombstone in the interior of one of the churches, 
eating the sandwiches that we had brought for 
luncheon, a man, who had entered the doorway, 
drew back instantly, seeing us taking a meal. 

The Seven Churches are rooted in long grass, 
spreading in billowy mounds, intertwisted here and 
there with brambles ; but when we set out for the 
circular fort of Dun Onaght, which lies on the 
other side of the road, at no great distance up the 
hill, we were once more in the land of rocks; and 
it was through a boreen, or lane, entirely paved with 

315 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

loose and rattling stones, that we made our way 
up the ascent. At the top of the hill we found 
ourselves outside such a building as I had never 
seen before : an ancient fort, 90 feet in diameter, 
and on the exterior 16 feet high, made of stones 
placed one upon another, without mortar, in the 
form of two walls, set together in layers, the inner 
wall lower than the outer, so as to form a species 
of gallery, to which stone steps led at intervals. No 
sooner had we got inside than the rain began to 
fall in torrents, and it was through a blinding down- 
pour that we hurried back to the car, scarcely stop- 
ping to notice a Druid altar that stood not far out 
of our way. As we drove along, the rain ceased 
suddenly; the wet cloud that had been steaming 
over the faint and still sea, as if desolated with 
winter, vanished in sunshine, caught up into a 
glory; and the water, transfigured by so instant 
a magic, was at once changed from a grey wilderness 
of shivering mist into a warm and flashing and 
intense blueness, which gathered ardency of colour, 
until the whole bay burned with blue fire. The 
clouds had been swept behind us, and on the other 
side of the water, for the whole length of the horizon, 
the beautiful, softly curving Connemara mountains 
stood out against the sky as if lit by some interior 
illumination, blue and pearl-grey and grey-rose. 
Along the shore-line a trail of faint cloud drifted 
from kelp-fire to kelp-fire, like altar-smoke drifting 
into altar-smoke ; and that mysterious mist floated 
into the lower hollows of the hills, softening their 
316 



The Islands of Aran. 

outlines and colours with a vague and fluttering 
and luminous veil of brightness. 

It was about four in the afternoon when we came 
to the village of Kilmurvey, upon the seashore, 
and, leaving our car, began to climb the hill leading 
to Dun Aengus. Passing two outer ramparts, 
now much broken, one of them seeming to end 
suddenly in the midst of a chevaux de frise of pillar- 
like stones thrust endways into the earth, we entered 
the central fort by a lintelled doorway, set in the 
side of a stone wall of the same Cyclopean architec- 
ture as Dun Onaght, i8 feet high on the outside, 
and with two adhering inner walls, each lower in 
height, 12 feet 9 inches in thickness. This fort 
is 150 feet north and south and 140 feet east and 
west, and on the east side the circular wall ends 
suddenly on the very edge of a clifF going down 
300 feet to the sea. It is supposed that the circle 
was once complete, and that the wall and the solid 
ground itself, which is here of bare rock, were slowly 
eaten away by the gnawing of centuries of waves, 
which have been at their task since some hundreds 
of years before the birth of Christ, when we know 
not what king, ruling over the races called "the 
servile," entrenched himself on that impregnable 
height. The Atlantic lies endlessly out towards 
the sunrise, beating, on the south, upon the brown 
and towering rock of the cliffs of Moher, rising up 
nearly a sheer thousand feet. The whole grey 
and desolate island, flowering into barren stone, 
stretches out on the other side, where the circle of 

317 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

the water washes from Galway Bay into the Atlantic. 
Looking out over all that emptiness of sea, one 
imagines the long-oared galleys of the ravaging 
kings who had lived there, some hundreds of years 
before the birth of Christ; and the emptiness of 
the fortress filled with long-haired warriors, coming 
back from the galleys with captured slaves, and 
cattle, and the spoil of citadels. We know from the 
Bardic writers that a civilisation, similar to that of 
the Homeric poems, lived on in Ireland almost 
to the time of the coming of St. Patrick; and it 
was something also of the sensation of Homer — 
the walls of Troy, the heroes, and that "face that 
launched a thousand ships" — which came to me 
as we stood upon these unconquerable walls, to 
which a generation of men had been as a moth's 
flight and a hundred years as a generation of men. 
Coming back from Dun Aengus, one of our 
party insisted on walking; and we had not been 
long indoors when he came in with a singular person 
whom he had picked up on the way, a professional 
story-teller, who had for three weeks been teaching 
Irish to the German philologist who had preceded 
us on the island. He was half blind and of wild 
appearance ; a small and hairy man, all gesture, and 
as if set on springs, who spoke somewhat broken 
English in a roar. He lamented that we could 
understand no Irish, but, even in English, he had 
many things to tell, most of which he gave as but 
"talk," making it very clear that we were not to 
suppose him to vouch for them. His own family, 
318 



The Islands of Aran. 

he told us, was said to be descended from the roons, 
or seals, but that certainly was *'talk"; and a 
witch had, only nine months back, been driven out 
of the island by the priest ; and there were many 
who said they had seen fairies, but for his part he 
had never seen them. But with this he began to 
swear on the name of God and the saints, rising 
from his chair and lifting up his hands, that what 
he was going to tell us was the truth ; and then he 
told how a man had once come into his house and 
admired his young child, who was lying there in his 
bed, and had not said "God bless you!" (without 
which to admire is to envy and to bring under the 
power of the fairies), and that night, and for many 
following nights, he had wakened and heard a sound 
of fighting, and one night had lit a candle, but 
to no avail, and another night had gathered up the 
blanket and tried to fling it over the head of whoever 
might be there, but had caught no one; only in 
the morning, going to a box in which fish were 
kept, he had found blood in the box; and at this 
he rose again, and again swore on the name of 
God and the saints that he was telling us only the 
truth, and true it was that the child had died; 
and as for the man who had ill-wished him, "I 
could point him out any day," he said fiercely. 
And then, with many other stories of the doings of 
fairies and priests (for he was very religious), and 
of the "Dane" who had come to the island to 
learn Irish ("and he knew all the languages, the 
Proosy, and the Roosy, and the Span, and the 

319 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

Grig"), he told us how Satan, being led by pride 
to equal himself with God, looked into the glass 
in which God only should look, and when Satan 
looked into the glass, "Hell was made in a minute." 
Next morning we were to leave early, and at 
nine o'clock we were rowed out to the hooker, which 
lifted sail in a good breeze, and upon a somewhat 
pitching sea, for the second island, Inishmaan, that 
is, the Middle Island, which is three miles long and 
a mile and a half broad. We came within easy 
distance of the shore, after about half an hour's 
quick sailing, and a curragh came out to us, rowed 
by two islanders ; but, finding the sea very rough in 
Gregory Sound, we took them on board, and, 
towing the boat after us, went about to the Foul 
Sound on the southern side of the island, where 
the sea was much calmer. Here we got into the 
curragh, sitting motionless for fear a slight move- 
ment on the part of any of us should upset it. The 
curragh is simply the coracle of the ancient Britons, 
made of wooden laths covered with canvas, and tarred 
on the outside, bent into the shape of a round- 
bottomed boat with a raised and pointed prow, and 
so light that, when on shore, two men can carry it 
reversed on their heads, like an immense hat or 
umbrella. As the curragh touched the shore, 
some of the islanders who had assembled at the 
edge of the sea came into the water to meet us, 
and took hold of the boat, and lifted the prow of it 
upon land, and said, *'You are welcome, you are 
welcome ! " One of them came with us, a nimble 
320 



The Islands of Aran. 

peasant of about forty, who led the way up the 
terraced side of the hill, on which there was a little 
grass, near the seashore, and then scarce anything 
but slabs and boulders of stone, to a little ruined 
oratory, almost filled with an alder tree, the only 
tree I saw on the island. All around it were grave- 
stones, half-defaced by the weather, but carved with 
curious armorial bearings, as it seemed, representing 
the sun and moon and stars about a cross formed 
of the Christian monogram. Among the graves 
were lying huge beams, that had been flung up the 
hillside from some wrecked vessel in one of the 
storms that beat upon the island. Going on a 
little farther we came to the ancient stone fort of 
Dun Moher, an inclosure slightly larger than Dun 
Onaght, but smaller than Dun Aengus ; and coming 
down on the other side, by some stone steps, we 
made our way, along a very rocky boreen, towards 
the village that twisted upon a brown zigzag 
around the slope of the hill. 

In the village we were joined by some more men 
and children ; and a number of women, wearing 
the same red clothes that we had seen on the larger 
island, and looking at us with perhaps scarcely 
so shy a curiosity (for they were almost too unused 
to strangers to have adopted a manner of shyness), 
came out to their doors and looked up at us out of 
the darkness of many interiors, from where they 
sat on the ground knitting or carding wool. We 
passed the chapel, a very modern-looking building, 
made out of an ancient church, and turned in for 

321 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

a moment to the cottage where the priest sleeps 
when he comes over from Inishmore on Saturday- 
night to say early mass on Sunday morning before 
going on to Inisheer for the second mass. We saw 
his little white room, very quaint and neat; and 
the woman of the house, speaking only Irish, 
motioned us to sit down, and could hardly be pre- 
vented from laying out plates and glasses for us 
upon the table. As we got a little through the 
more populous part of the village, we saw ahead of 
us, down a broad lane, a very handsome girl, holding 
the end of a long ribbon, decorated with a green 
bough, across the road. Other girls and some older 
women were standing by, and, when we came up, 
the handsome girl, with the low forehead and the 
sombre blue eyes, cried out laughingly, in her 
scanty English, " Cash, cash ! " We paid toll, 
as the custom is, and got her blessing; and went 
on our way, leaving the path, and climbing many 
stone walls, until we came to the great fort of Dun 
Conor on the hill, the largest of the ancient forts of 
Aran. 

Dun Conor is 227 feet north and south and 115 
feet east and west, with walls in three sections, 20 
feet high on the outside and 18 feet 7 inches thick. 
We climbed to the top and walked around the wall, 
where the wind blowing in from the sea beat so 
hard upon us that we could scarcely keep our 
footing. From this height we could see all over 
the island lying out beneath us, grey, and broken 
into squares by the walled fields ; the brown thatch 
322 



The Islands of Aran. 

of the village, the smoke coming up from the 
chimneys, here and there a red shawl or skirt, the 
grey sand by the sea and the grey sea all round. 
As we stood on the wall many peasants came slowly 
about us, climbing up on all sides, and some stood 
together just inside the entrance, and two or three 
girls sat down on the other side of the arena, knitting. 
Presently an old man, scarcely leaning on the stick 
which he carried in his hand, came towards us, and 
began slowly to climb the steps. "It is my father," 
said one of the men; "he is the oldest man on the 
island; he was born in 1812." The old man 
climbed slowly up to where we stood; a mild old 
man, with a pale face, carefully shaved, and a firm 
mouth, who spoke the best English that we had 
heard there. "If any gentleman has committed a 
crime," said the oldest man on the island, "we'll 
hide him. There was a man killed his father, and 
he came over here, and we hid him for two months, 
and he got away safe to America." 

As we came down from the fort the old man 
came with us, and I and another, walking ahead, 
lingered for some time with the old man by a stone 
stile. "Have you ever seen the fairies ? " said my 
friend, and a quaint smile flickered over the old 
man's face, and with many ohs ! and grave gestures 
he told us that he had never seen them, but that he 
had heard them crying in the fort by night ; and one 
night, as he was going along with his dog, just at 
the spot where we were then standing, the dog 
had suddenly rushed at something or some one, 

323 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and had rushed round and round him, but he could 
see nothing, though it was bright moonhght, and 
so Hght that he could have seen a rat; and he had 
followed across several fields, and again the dog 
had rushed at the thing, and had seemed to be 
beaten off, and had come back covered with sweat, 
and panting, but he could see nothing. And there 
was a man once, he knew the man, and could point 
him out, who had been out in his boat (and he 
motioned with his stick to a certain spot on the 
water), and a sea fairy had seized hold of his boat 
and tried to come into it ; but he had gone quickly 
on shore, and the thing, which looked like a man, 
had turned back into the sea. And there had 
been a man once on the island who used to talk 
with the fairies ; and you could hear him going 
along the roads by night swearing and talking with 
the fairies. "And have you ever heard," said 
my friend "of the seals, the roons, turning into 
men?" "And indeed," said the oldest man on 
the island, smiling, "I'm a roon, for I'm one of 
the family they say comes from the roons." "And 
have you ever heard," said my friend, "of men 
going back into the sea and turning roons again .? " 
"I never heard that," said the oldest man on the 
island reflectively, seeming to ponder over the 
probability of the occurrence; "no," he repeated 
after a pause, "I never heard that." 

We came back to the village by the road we had 
come, and passed again the handsome girl who had 
taken toll ; she was sitting by the roadside knitting, 
324 



The Islands of Aran. 

and looked at us sidelong as we passed, with an 
almost imperceptible smile in her eyes. We wan- 
dered for some time a little vaguely, the amiability 
of the islanders leading them to bring us in search 
of various ruins which we imagined to exist, and 
which they did not like to tell us were not in exist- 
ence. I found the people on this island even more 
charming, because a little simpler, more untouched 
by civilisation, than those on the larger island. 
They were of necessity a little lonelier, for if few 
people come to Inishmore, how many have ever 
spent a night on Inishmaan .? Inishmore has its 
hotel, but there is no hotel on Inishmaan; there 
is indeed one public-house, but there is not even 
a policeman, so sober, so law-abiding are these 
islanders. It is true that I succeeded, with some 
difficulty, and under cover of some mystery, in secur- 
ing, what I had long wished to taste, a bottle of 
poteen or illicit whisky. But the brewing of 
poteen is, after all, almost romantic in its way, 
with that queer, sophistical romance of the contra- 
band. That was not the romance I associated with 
this most peaceful of islands as we walked along 
the sand on the seashore, passing the kelp-burners, 
who were collecting long brown trails of seaweed. 
More than anything I had ever seen, this seashore 
gave me the sensation of the mystery and the calm 
of all the islands one has ever dreamed of, all the 
fortunate islands that have ever been saved out of 
the disturbing sea ; this delicate pearl-grey sand, 
the deeper grey of the stones, the more luminous 

325 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

grey of the water, and so consoling an air as of 
immortal twilight and the peace of its dreams. 

I had been in no haste to leave Inishmore, but 
I was still more loth to leave Inishmaan ; and I 
think that it was with reluctance on the part of all 
of us that we made our way to the curragh which 
was waiting for us in the water. The islanders 
waved their caps, and called many good blessings 
after us as we were rowed back to the hooker, 
which again lifted sail and set out for the third and 
smallest island, Inisheer, that is, the South Island. 

We set out confidently, but when we had got 
out of shelter of the shore, the hooker began to rise 
and fall with some violence; and by the time we 
had come within landing distance of Inisheer the 
waves were dashing upon us with so great an 
energy that it was impossible to drop anchor, and 
our skipper advised us not to try to get to land. A 
curragh set out from the shore, and came some 
way towards us, riding the waves. It might have 
been possible, I doubt not, to drop by good luck 
from the rolling side of the hooker into the pitching 
bottom of the curragh, and without capsizing the 
curragh ; but the chances were against it. Tom 
Joyce, holding on to the ropes of the main-sail, 
and the most seaman-like of us, in the stern, shouted 
at each other above the sound of the wind. We 
were anxious to make for Ballyline, the port nearest 
to Listoonvarna, on the coast of Clare; but this 
Joyce declared to be impossible in such a sea, and 
with such a wind, and advised that we should make 
326 



The Islands of Aran. 

for Ballyvaughan, round Black Head Point, where 
we should find a safe harbour. It was now about 
a quarter past one, and we set out for Ballyvaughan 
with the wind fair behind us. The hooker rode 
well, and the waves but rarely came over the wind- 
ward side as she lay over towards her sail, taking 
leap after leap through the white-edged furrows 
of the grey water. For two hours and a half we 
skirted the Clare coast, which came to me, and 
disappeared from me, as the gunwale dipped or 
rose on the leeward side. The islands were blotted 
out behind us long before we had turned the sheer 
corner of Black Head, the ultimate edge of Ireland, 
and at last we came round the headland into quieter 
water, and so, after a short time, into a little harbour 
of Ballyvaughan, where we set foot on land again, 
and drove for hours along the Clare coast and inland 
into Galway, under that sunset of gold fire and 
white spray, back to Tillyra Castle, where I felt 
the ground once more solid under my feet. 

Summer, 1896. 



327 



In Sligo. 

Rosses Point and Glencar. 

Rosses Point is a village of pilots and fishing 
people, stretching out seawards in a long thin single 
line of thatched and whitewashed houses along 
the branch of the sea which goes from the little 
harbour of Sligo to broaden out into the bay beyond 
the edge of Dorren's or Coney Island, and the 
rocks of Dead Man's Point. It is a lazy village, 
where no one is very rich or very poor, but all are 
able, without too much exertion, to make just enough 
not to need to work any harder. The people are 
slow, sturdy, contented people, with a singular 
dislike of doing anything for money, except that 
they let rooms during the summer to the people of 
Sligo, who make it their watering-place, going in 
and out daily, when needful, on the little paddle- 
steamer which plies backward and forward between 
Sligo and the Point, or on the long car which takes 
in their messages and their marketing-baskets. 
Very few people from the outer world ever find their 
way here; and there are peasants living at the far 
end of the village who have never been so far as 
the village of Lower Rosses, on the other side of 
the green lands. They know more of the coast 
of Spain, the River Plate, and the Barbadoes than 
they know of the other side of their own mountains, 
for seafaring men go far, I have just been talking 
with a seaman, now a pilot here, who has told me 
of Venice and of the bull-fights he saw at Huelva, 
and of Antwerp, and the Riga, and Le Havre j 
328 



In Sligo. 

and of the coast of Cornwall, and Milford Haven, 
and the Firth of Forth; and of America and the 
West Indies. Yesterday I saw a bright green parrot 
on a child's hand ; they have been telling me of 
"the black girl" who came here from some foreign 
ship and lived here, and knew better than any one 
else where to find the plovers' eggs ; and I have 
seen the rim of a foreign ship, rising out of the sand 
at low tide, which was wrecked here seventy years 
ago, and is now turning green under the water. 

Men and women, here at the Point, loiter about 
all day long; there are benches outside most of 
the cabins, and they sit there, or on the low, rough 
wall which skirts the road, or on the big stones at 
the edge of the water, or upon the green lands. 
Most of the women are bare-headed, none go 
barefoot, and only a few of the poorer children. 
And the children here are very proud. They will 
row you about all day for nothing, but they will 
not bring you a can of water from the well if you 
pay them for it. That is a point of view they have 
learnt from their parents, and it seems to me a 
simple and sufficing one. For these people have 
attained comfort, a certain dignity (that dignity 
which comes from concerning yourself only with 
what concerns you), and they have the privilege of 
living in a beautiful, harmonious place, without 
any of the distractions which harass poorer or less 
contented people in towns, and keep them from 
the one thing worth living for, the leisure to know 
oneself. This fine laziness of theirs in the open air, 

329 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

with the constant, subduing sense of the sea's peril, 
its hold upon their lives and fortunes, moulds them 
often into a self-sufficing manliness, a hardy woman- 
hood ; sometimes it makes them dreamers, and 
they see fairies and hear the fairy piper calling in 
the caves. 

How, indeed, is it possible that they should not 
see more of the other world than most folk do, and 
catch dreams in their nets ? For it is a place of 
dreams, a grey, gentle place, where the sand melts 
into the sea, the sea into the sky, and the mountains 
and the clouds drift one into the other, I have 
never seen so friendly a sea nor a sea so full of the 
ecstasy of sleep. On one of those luminous grey 
days, which are the true atmosphere of the place, 
it is like being in an eternal morning of twilight to 
wander over the undulating green lands, fringed 
at the shore by a soft rim of bent, a pale honey- 
coloured green, and along the delicate grey sands, 
from Dead Man's Point to the point of the Third 
Rosses. The sea comes in softly, rippling against 
the sand with a low plashing, which even on very 
warm days has a cool sound and a certain gentleness 
even on days of rough weather. The headland 
of Roughley O 'Byrne runs on, a wavering line of 
faint green, from the dark and cloudy masses of 
the Lissadell woods into the hesitating line of the 
grey waters. On the other side of the bay Dorren's 
Island curves around, almost like part of the semi- 
circle of the mainland, its sickle-point leaning out 
towards the white hghthouse, which rises up out of 
330 



In Sligo. 

the water like a phantom, or the stone image of 
a wave that has risen up out of the sea on a day 
of storm. Faint mountains ghmmer out to sea, 
many-coloured mountains close in upon the land, 
shutting it off from the world of strange cities. 
And if you go a little in from the sea-edge, over 
the green lands, you will come to a great pool, 
where the waters are never troubled nor the 
reeds still ; but there is always a sighing of wind 
in the reeds, as of a very gentle and melancholy 
peace. 

Go on a little farther still, and you come to the 
fighting village of Magherow, where the men are 
red-bearded, fierce, great shouters, and not readier 
to row than to do battle with their oars. They 
come into Rosses Point, generally, at the regatta; 
and at that time the Point is at its liveliest, there is 
much whisky drunk, and many quarrels flame up. 
There is a great dance, too, most years, at the time 
of the regatta. It is known as the cake dance, and 
not so long ago a cake and a bottle of whisky were 
hung out of a window by green ribbons, the cake 
for the best woman dancer and the bottle of whisky 
for the best man dancer. Now there is no cake 
at all, and if there is much whisky, it is handed 
over the counter in big glasses, and not hung out 
of the window by green ribbons. The prize now 
is money, and so the people of the Point, with their 
fine, independent objection to doing anything for 
money, are less ready to show off their notable 
powers of dancing ; and the women, who, besides, 

331 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

are getting to prefer the waltzes and quadrilles of 
the towns, will not take part in the dance at all. 

The regatta this year was not too well managed, 
having passed out of the hands of the village pilots ; 
and it was unwisely decided that the dance should 
be held the same evening, outside the door of a 
public-house where the crews of the losing boats 
had been drinking at the expense of the captains 
of the winning boats. It was very dark, and there 
was a great crowd, a great confusion. A somewhat 
battered door had been laid down for the dancing, 
and the press of people kept swaying in upon the 
narrow limits of the door, where only a few half- 
tipsy fellows pounded away, lurching into one 
another's arms. Everybody swayed, and yelled, 
and encouraged, and expostulated, and the melodion 
sounded fitfully ; and presently the door was pulled 
from under the feet of the dancers and the police 
shouldered into the midst of what would soon have 
been a very pretty fight. The dance was postponed 
to Monday, when some of the boats were to race 
again. 

On Monday, at about half-past six, I met eight 
small boys carrying a large door upon their shoulders. 
They were coming up through the village to the 
green lands, where they laid down the door on the 
grass. About an hour afterwards, as it began to 
get very dark, the people came slowly up from the 
village, and a wide ring was made by a rope carried 
around stakes set in the earth, and the people 
gathered about the ring, in the middle of which 

332 



In Sligo. 

lay the door, lit on one side by a ship's lantern and 
on the other by the lamp of a bicycle. A chair 
was put for the judge, who was a pilot and a publican, 
and one of the few Gaelic speakers in the village, 
and a man of few words, and a man of weight; 
and another chair was put for the musician, who 
played on the melodion, an instrument which has 
long since replaced the fiddle as the national instru- 
ment of Ireland. A row of very small children lay 
along the grass inside the rope, the girls in one place, 
the boys in another. It was so dark that I could 
only vaguely distinguish, in a curve of very black 
shadow, the people opposite to me in the circle, 
and presently it began to rain a little and still we 
waited. At last a man came forward, and the 
musician began to play a lively tune on his melodion, 
keeping time with his feet, and there was a great 
cry of "Gallagher! Gallagher!" and much shout- 
ing and whistling. It was a shepherd from Lower 
Rosses, a thin and solemn young man, who began 
to dance with great vigour and regularity, tapping 
heavily on the rough boards with very rough and 
heavy boots. He danced several step-dances, and 
was much applauded. Then, after a pause, an old 
man from the Point, Redmond Bruen by name, 
a pilot, who had very cunningly won the duck-hunt 
at the regatta, stepped forward unevenly, and began 
to walk about on the door, shuffling his feet, bowing 
to right and left, and waving a stick that he held 
in his hand. "When he's sober, he's a great 
dancer," we were assured. He was not sober, 

333 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and at first did no more than shuffle. Then he 
stopped, seemed to recollect himself, and the reputa- 
tion he had to keep up, and with more bowing to 
the public, began to sing, with variations, a song 
popular among the Irish peasants, "On the Rocky- 
Road to Dublin." It is a dramatic song, and after 
every stanza he acted, in his dance, the fight on 
the road, the passage from Holyhead, and the other 
stirring incidents of the song. The old man 
swayed there in the vague light, between the two 
lanterns, a whimsical and pathetic figure, with his 
grey beard, his helpless gestures, and the random 
gaiety of his legs ; he danced with a wonderful 
lightness, and one could but just hear his boots 
passing over the boards. 

We applauded him with enthusiasm, and he 
came and sat on the grass inside the ring, near the 
children, who were gradually creeping closer in; 
and his place was taken by the serious Gallagher, 
who was quite sober, and who pounded away like 
clockwork, holding his body quite stiff, and rattling 
his boots with great agility. The old man watched 
him keenly, and presently got up and made for the 
door again. He began to dance, stopped, flung off 
his coat, and set off again with a certain elaboration, 
variety, and even delicacy in his dancing, which 
would have won him the prize, I think, if he had 
been sober enough to make the most of his qualities. 
He at least thoroughly appreciated his own skill. 
"That's a good reel," he would say when he halted 
for breath and emphasis. 
334 



In Sligo. 

Meanwhile Gallagher was looking for a partner, 
and one or two young fellows took the boards, 
and did each a single dance, in pairs or singly. 
Then a young man who, Hke Bruen, was "a grand 
dancer when sober," but who was even less sober 
than Bruen, reeled across the grass, kicked over one 
of the lanterns, and began to dance opposite Galla- 
gher. Then he pushed Gallagher off the board 
and danced by himself. He was in his shirt-sleeves 
and without hat or collar, and much of his dance 
was merely an unsteady walking. He stopped 
frequently, and appeared to think ; and, after much 
thinking, it occurred to him that it was the music 
which would not keep time with his dancing. So 
he walked up to the musician, snatched the melodion 
away from him, and marched off with it, I suppose 
to find another player. He passed into the dark- 
ness ; the melodion in his hands squealed out of 
the darkness. Then he came back dangling it, 
and was told to give it back again, which he did 
sulkily, with exactly the look and gesture of a 
naughty child who has been called to order. And 
then Gallagher came forward again, and, taking 
off his hat, said he would sing a song. He got 
through a verse or two, chanting gravely in a kind 
of sing-song, and then, coming to the line, "And 
he said to the landlord," paused, and said, "I am 
not able to do any more." There was a great 
laugh, and Gallagher returned to his dancing, in 
which he was presently joined by a new rival. 
Gallagher got the prize. 

335 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

I was told that so poor a dance had not been 
seen before at Rosses Point, and the blame was laid 
on new ways, and the coming of the waltzes and 
quadrilles, and the folly of young people who think 
old things not good enough for them. And the 
old people shook their heads that night over the 
turf fires in their cabins. 

Seven miles inland from Rosses Point the moun- 
tains open, and, entering a great hollow called the 
Windy Gap, you come upon a small lake with green 
fields around it and mountains full of woods and 
waterfalls rising up behind it. This is Glencar, 
and there is a cabin by the side of the lake where 
I spent a few enchanted days of rain and sunshine, 
wandering over the mountain-side and among the 
wild and delicate woods. Above the cabin there is 
a great mountain, and the woods climb from about 
the cabin to almost the summit of the mountain. 
Fir trees rise up like marching banners, line upon 
line; between them the foliage is softer, green 
moss grows on the tree-trunks and ferns out of the 
moss; quicken-berries flame on the heights above 
the streams ; the many-coloured green of leaves is 
starred with bright orange, shadowed with spectral 
blue, clouded with the exquisite ashen pallor of 
decaying heather. Rocky steps lead from height 
to height along the edge of chasms veiled with leafy 
branches, and there is always a sound of many 
waters, falling in torrents down black stairways of 
rock, and rushing swiftly along narrow passages 
336 



In Sligo. 

between grass and ferns. Here and there a bridge 
of fallen trunks, set roughly together, and covered 
with the adventurous soil, which, in these parts, 
bears fruit wherever it has an inch to cling to, 
crosses a waterfall just above the actual descent. 
Winding paths branch off in every direction, and 
in the soft earth of these narrow and precipitous 
ways one can see little hoof-prints, and occasionally 
one meets a donkey going slowly uphill, with the 
creels on its back, to fetch turf from the bog. And 
always there is the sound of water, like the cool 
singing voice of the rocks, above the sound of 
rusthng leaves, and birds piping, and the flapping 
of great wings, which are the voices of the many- 
instrumented orchestra of the woods. Here one 
is in the heart of the mountains and in the heart of 
the forest ; and, wandering along a grassy path 
at evening, one seems to be very close to something 
very ancient and secret. 

The mountains here are whole regions, and when 
you have climbed to their summit through the 
woods, you find yourself on a vast plain, and this 
plain stretches so far that it seems to fill the horizon 
and you cannot see anything on the other side of 
it. Looking down into the valley, which seems 
scooped out of the solid mountains, you can see, 
on the other side of the Windy Gap, the thin line 
of Rosses Point going out into the sea, and the sea 
stretches out so far before it reaches the horizon 
that you can catch a yellow glimmer of sunlight, 
lying out beyond the horizon visible from the shore. 

337 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

The fields, around and beyond the poHshed mirror 
of the lake, seem, in their patchwork of greens and 
browns, like a little map of the world. The 
mountain-top, which you have fancied from below 
to be such sohd ground, proves, if you try to cross 
it, to be a great yielding bog, with intervals of rock 
or hard soil. To walk over it is to move in short 
jumps, with an occasional longer leap across a 
dried-up watercourse. I like the voluptuous soft- 
ness of the bog, for one's feet sink luxuriously into 
even the pale golden mounds of moss which rise 
between the rusty heather and starveling grasses 
of the sheer morass. And it has the treachery 
which is always one of the allurements of voluptuous 
things. Nor is it the bog only which is treacher- 
ous on these mountains. The mist comes down on 
them very suddenly, and in that white darkness 
even the natives sometimes lose their way, and are 
drawn over the sheer edge of the mountain. My 
host has just come in to tell me that last night there 
was a great brewing of poteen on Ben Bulben, and 
that many of the drinkers wandered all night, 
losing their way in the mist, and that one of them, 
not having the drunkard's luck, fell over a rocky 
place, and is now lying dead on the mountain. 

I had been thinking of such possibilities yester- 
day as I climbed, peak after peak, the mountains 
on the other side of the lake. Cope's Mountain, 
Lugnagall, Cashlagall, Cragnamoona. They are 
bare and treeless, crossed by a few donkey-tracks, 
and I sometimes deserted these looped and coiling 
338 



In Sligo. 

ways for the more hazardous directness of the dry- 
watercourses which seam the mountains from head 
to foot. Once at the top, you look over almost 
the whole county, lying out in a green plain, ridged 
with hedges, clustered with woods, glittering with 
lakes ; here and there a white cabin, a scattered 
village, and just below, in the hollow of the land 
and water, the little curving grey town of Sligo, 
with its few ships resting in harbour, and beyond 
them the long black line which is Rosses Point, 
and then the sea, warm with sunlight, and, as if 
islanded in the sea, the hills of Mayo. I have 
never seen anything resembling the view from these 
mountains ; I have never seen anything, in its 
way, more beautiful. And when, last night, after 
a tossed and blood-red sunset, the white mist 
curdled about the heads of Ben Bulben and Knock- 
narea, and a faint, luminous mist filled the whole 
hollow of the valley, there seemed to be a mingling 
of all the worlds ; and the world in which ships 
went out from the harbour of Sligo, and the poteen- 
makers wandered over the mountain, was not more 
real than the world of embodied dreams in which 
the fairies dance in their forts, or beat at the cabin 
doors, or chuckle among the reeds. 

Summer, 1896. 



339 



From a Castle in Ireland. 

In the mysterious castle, lost among trees that 
start up suddenly around it, out of a land of green 
meadows and grey stones, where I have been so 
delightfully Hving through the difficult month of 
August, London, and books, and one's daily habits 
seem scarcely appreciable; too far away on the 
other side of this mountainous land enclosing one 
within the circle of its own magic. It is a castle 
of dreams, where, in the morning, I chmb the 
winding staircase in the tower, creep through the 
secret passage, and find myself in the vast deserted 
room above the chapel, which is my retiring-room 
for meditation ; or, following the winding staircase, 
come out on the battlements, where I can look 
widely across Galway to the hills. In the evening 
my host plays Vittoria and Palestrina on the organ, 
in the half darkness of the hall, and I wander between 
the pillars of black marble, hearing the many 
voices rising into the dome : Vittoria, the many 
lamentable human voices, crying on the sins of the 
world, the vanity of pleasant sins ; Palestrina, an 
exultation and a triumph, in which the many voices 
of white souls go up ardently into heaven. In the 
afternoon we drive through a strange land, which 
has the desolation of ancient and dwindling things ; 
a grey land, into which human life comes rarely, 
and with a certain primitive savagery. As we drive 
seawards, the stone walls closing in the woods 
dwindle into low, roughly heaped hedges of un- 
mortared stones, over which only an occasional 

340 



From a Castle in Ireland. 

cluster of trees lifts itself; and the trees strain 
wildly in the air, writhing away from the side of 
the sea, where the winds from the Atlantic have 
blown upon them and transfixed them in an eternity 
of flight from an eternal flagellation. As far as 
one can see, as far as the blue, barren mountains 
which rise up against the horizon, there are these 
endless tracks of harsh meadow-land, marked into 
squares by the stone hedges, and themselves heaped 
with rocks and stones, lying about like some grey 
fungus growth. Not a sign of human life is to be 
seen; at long intervals we pass a cabin, white- 
washed, thatched roughly, with stopped-up windows 
and a half-closed door, from behind which a grey- 
haired old woman will gaze at you with her steady, 
melancholy eyes. A few peasants pass on the road, 
moving sombrely, without speaking ; the men, for 
the most part, touch their hats, without change of 
expression; the women, drawing their shawls 
about their faces, merely look at you, with a slow, 
scrutinising air, more indiff'erent than curious. 
The women walk bare-footed and with the admirable 
grace and straightness of all who go with bare feet. 
I remember, in the curve of a rocky field, some 
little way in from the road, seeing a young woman 
wearing a blue bodice, a red petticoat, and a grey 
shawl, carrying a tin pail on her head, with that 
straight, flexible movement of the body, that slow 
and formal grace of Eastern women who have 
carried pitchers from the well. Occasionally a 
fierce old man on a horse, wearing the old costume, 

341 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

that odd, precise kind of dress-coat, passes you 
with a surly scowl; or a company of tinkers (the 
Irish gipsies, one might call them) trail past, huddled 
like crouching beasts on their little, rough, open 
carts, driving a herd of donkeys before them. As 
we get nearer the village by the sea, the cabins 
become larger and more frequent; and just before 
reaching it we pass a ruined castle, impregnably 
built on a green mound, looking over the water to 
the quay, where the thin black masts of a few vessels 
rise motionless against the little whitewashed houses. 
The road goes down a steep hill, and turns sharply, 
in the midst of the grey village, with its thatched 
and ragged roofs. The doors all stand open, the 
upper windows are drawn half down, and from 
some of them I see a dishevelled dark head, the 
hair and eyes of a gipsy (one could well have fancied), 
looking down on the road and the passers-by. As 
the road rises again, we see the blue mountains 
coming nearer to us, and the place where, one 
knows, is Galway Bay, lying too low for any flash 
of the waters. Now we are quite near the sea, and 
in front of the house we are to visit (you will hear 
all about it in M. Bourget's next nouvelle), a brown 
mass of colour comes suddenly into the dull green 
and grey of the fields, and one smells the seaweed 
lying there in the pools. 

I find all this bareness, greyness, monotony, 
solitude at once primitive and fantastical, curiously 
attractive, giving just the same kind of relief from 
the fat, luxurious English landscape that these 

342 



From a Castle in Ireland. 

gaunt, nervous, long-chinned peasants give from 
the red and rolHng sleepiness of the English villager. 
And there is a quite national vivacity and variety 
of mood in the skies here, in the restless atmosphere, 
the humorous exaggerations of the sun and rain. 
To-day is a typical Irish day, soft, warm, grey, 
with intervals of rain and fine weather; I can see 
a sort of soft mist of rain, blown loosely about 
between the trees of the park, the clouds an almost 
luminous grey, the sun shining through them ; at 
their darkest, scarcely darker than the Irish stone 
of which the castle is built. Driving, the other day, 
we passed a large pool among the rocks, in the midst 
of those meadows flowering with stones ; the sky 
was black with the rain that was falling upon the 
hills, and the afternoon sun shone against the deep 
blackness of the sky and the shadowed blackness 
of the water. I have never seen such coloured 
darkness as this water; green passing into slate, 
slate into purple, purple into dead black. And it 
was all luminous, floating there in the harbour of 
the grass like a tideless sea. Then there is the 
infinite variety of the mountains, sloping in uneven 
lines around almost the whole horizon. They are 
as variable as the clouds, and, while you look at 
them, have changed from a purple darkness to a 
luminous and tender green, and then into a Hfeless 
grey, and seem to float towards you and drift away 
from you like the clouds. 

Among these sohd and shifting things, in this 
castle which is at once so ancient a reality and so 

343 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

essential a dream, I feel myself to be in some danger 
of loosening the tightness of my hold upon external 
things, of foregoing many delectable pleasures, of 
forgetting many things that I have passionately 
learnt in cities. If I lived here too long I should 
forget that I live in London and remember that I 
am a Cornishman. 



Summer, 1896. 



344 



Dover Cliffs. 

I. 

Nature made Dover for her pleasure, and man 
has remade Dover for his use. The cHffs have 
been tunnelled within and fortified overhead ; the 
sea has been bound inside a vast harbour, and driven 
back to make way for trucks and trolleys to carry 
stones for its prison walls ; the smoke of funnels 
has superseded the gentle motions of sails ; there 
are forts and barracks and prisons, like great ware- 
houses for human goods ; everywhere there is 
action, change, energy; there are foreign faces^, 
people coming and going from the ends of the 
earth, to whom Dover is a stepping-stone ; and it 
is a gate, which can be opened to friends and closed 
on enemies. A gate of England, one of the Cinque 
Ports and the only one of them that has held its 
own; it has always been a part of history; it is 
our only port which has a natural magnificence 
and a great tradition. 

The sea at Dover, since the Admiralty has looped 
it in with its stone barriers, can hardly be said to 
have remained a quite wholly natural part of nature 
any longer. It has been tamed, brought to serve 
man meekly, and not at its own will. By day we 
see the gap in its prison walls, and the ships going 
in and out, to be caught or loosed. But by night 
there is the aspect of a lake, and the gold and red 
and green lights that go in a semicircle about it 
seem like lights outlining a curving shore. The 
execrable British pleasure-pier, with the "looped 

345 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

and windowed nakedness" of its bulbed head 
thrust, impudently glittering, into the water, adds 
the last sign to the deeper signs of man's domination. 
Yet, by day or night, if you listen, you will hear the 
lisp of water on the pebbles, in a faint, powerless 
affirmation : you will know, in that faint sound, 
the sea's voice. But to see the sea, really itself, 
and to hear it speak out at its own pleasure, you 
must stand on the stone wall which binds it in from 
the west wind, or look down from the cliffs, on 
west or east. The cliffs share in its liberty; they 
have never consented to its bondage; they endure 
its buffetings with patience, as friendly losers do 
in a game. When the wind freshens and the water 
is whipped from green to white, and leaps at and 
over the great stone pier of the Admiralty in showers 
of white foam, the cliffs above it turn to the colour 
of thunder-clouds. Under a faint mist cliffs and 
sea suffer a new enchantment ; a bloom comes out 
over them, seeming to melt them into a single in- 
tangible texture. And cliffs and sea, in sun or 
storm, are at one : the sea, the witch of destiny, at 
all her passes, and the cliffs, English women, white 
and tall and delicately shaped. 

The loveliest of the cliffs is that one which should 
no longer be called Shakespeare's, for it has been 
desecrated by a foul black tunnel and the smoke of 
engines, and a railway-train, which has devastated 
the beach, goes through the tunnel to a bay beyond 
where a black chimney gapes at the mouth of a 
problematical coal-mine. This is one of the worst 
346 



Dover Cliffs. 

things which man has done here in his struggle 
to subdue nature. A harbour may add less beauty 
than it takes from the sea ; but it is a vast, kind, 
friendly thing in which the sea is not unwilling to 
co-operate. A harbour is that refuge in which 
ships that have come there from the ends of the 
world lie at rest : men have built it for them. But 
here, for the moment, man has beaten and defaced 
nature; beauty has been baffled, so far as man 
can do it. For the sea remains, and the cliff is still 
a white eminence, with a few pebbles at its feet 
and a thin green covering on its back. Broken 
beauty is remembered even after it has been utterly 
destroyed; and man and his works have their day 
and pass over. Here, too, nature will outlast him; 
and the sea waits, knowing that she will one day have 
her revenge on these sorry makings of his hands. 

11. 

It is the cliffs that make the best beauty of 
Dover. They are her crown, her support, her 
defence; they hold her in their arms as she sits, 
white and long, with her feet in the sea. They are 
beautiful, at all hours, with their white walls and the 
bare green and brown of their downs ; they are 
like fortresses, calm, assured, steadfast, and ready 
to become impregnable. Everywhere towers, walls, 
the heavy, square castle, suggest ancient defences ; 
and the friendliness of the cliffs to the town, which 
it holds against the sea, has a reticence of manner 

347 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

towards strangers and foreign coasts. At night 
they rise mysteriously against the sky, with rows 
and patches of hghts shining out of dull level walls, 
turned now into candelabra for candles of gold 
fire. The old, red, gabled, sordid harbour, seen 
dimly, its lights striking like red and yellow knives 
into the stagnant water, becomes a kind of fairy 
thing, which one vaguely remembers to have seen 
in foreign lands. Which ? Venice has no such 
eager cliffs above her tamed water; and Venice, for 
a moment, has come into the memory, returning 
there, as she does at most sights of houses looking 
down into water. Is it Alicante } The palms 
on the sand are not here, nothing of what is African 
in that rare coast of Spain ; but I remember a certain 
likeness in the hill with its castle rising more abruptly 
over a long, curved town whiter and stranger than 
Dover. 

To see Dover as a whole, you must stand on the 
stone parapet above the landing-place, where the 
steamers slide in gently, hardly touching the quay 
with the wooden roofs over their propellers. You 
must turn your back on the sea, which is there 
really the sea, and not an enclosed bay, a harbour 
made for ships to come back into ; and you must 
look across the black engine-smoke of the trains, 
to the white cliflFs, which with evening turn to a dull 
grey, over the long curve of white-fronted houses, 
with their dark-green balconies and flat windows 
set at regular intervals ; going on beyond them 
to the east, with many indentations, white, vast, 
348 



Dover CliiFs. 

and delicate, shutting in the sea with its high walls, 
and seeming to throw out long, thin piers to clutch 
and imprison it; on the west, Shakespeare's Cliff, 
and then smoke and the long mine-chimney, and 
the cliffs turn the corner and are beyond your sight. 
But, for the very heart of Dover, you must look 
under you, where dock after dock lies motionless, 
its long arms shut about its guests. 

They are like most other harbour-docks, dingy, 
with low, irregular houses painted with signs and 
letterings; Hamburg-American Line, Hearts of Oak 
Dining-Rooms, Cope's Tobaccos. There are red 
roofs and gables and an old sordidness about every- 
thing at the edge of this pale-green stagnant water, 
which never moves except under some heavy hull, or 
under the feet of that white bird sitting disconsolately 
on the floating buoy. The inner and outer harbour 
has each its big ships, stacked side by side, funnels 
and masts together, against the same quay with 
the same little old gabled low red houses with the 
same modern signs. At night one sees beyond 
them only the lighted windows of flat house-fronts, 
showing nothing in the darkness but loop-holes, 
as if nothing were behind them. Masts, taut rope- 
ladders from mast to bulwark, furled sails laid by 
in the sides of the ship, the sharp lines of ropes 
stretched out in delicate patterns, it is these that 
give beauty, even before the night has come with 
its transformations, to this kind of sea-pool where 
vast many-tentacled animals crawl, clinging like 
hmpets to the wet walls. 

349 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

The ship's beauty was lost when sails went and 
masts went, and funnels and boilers took their 
place, as the modern machine has taken the place 
of every beautiful thing that went on the wind and 
was worked by human hands. The lovely shape 
was lost when great bulges came for useful purposes 
on either side of the carcase which they trampled 
into speed. Figments of scarcely serviceable masts 
remain, with a little of the spider's work of cords, 
waiting for sails which are never to .fly up and run 
before wind. The wind is no longer, for those 
who go down to the sea in ships, more than an 
obstacle or a danger; it adds no swiftness to the 
course of sails flying before it, but may delay or 
incommode the steady indifferent progress of the 
steamer. Does not its name betray it ^ the thing 
that steams, a thing heated from within, a churner 
of waves. It is no longer a ship, which was a light, 
veering thing, like a bird, half tamed to a man's 
hand, escaping from him and unpunctually returning. 
Now, as I see a Channel steamer move slowly out 
backwards from the dock and turn slowly in the 
middle water of the harbour, I am reminded rather 
of the vast slowly stepping motion of elephants. 



III. 

Dover under all shades of mists is personal, up 
to a certain point beautiful. One night I saw from 
the window a thick white mist come almost suddenly 

3SO 



Dover ClifFs. 

out of the sea; the Hghts were blotted out, the mimic 
guns, the bells, the fog-horns, snoring in different 
keys, were heard all through the night. It was 
the intermittent battle going on between the stealthy- 
white forces and the resistant brain of man. The 
fog lasted till early morning, when a blazing sun, 
like one of Blake's, came out and burned through 
the shivering vapours. On all the boats and planks 
lying on the pebbles of the beach one saw, still 
clinging there, as the sun lightened them, a white 
wetness which the fog had left on them like some 
sea-dew. 

I write of it now as if it had been beautiful; 
but I got my own share of discomfort out of it, 
for I lay awake all night, unable to keep my mind 
from counting the horrible iteration of sounds, 
repeated with a monotony like that of some torture, 
between pit and pendulum. Every separate hoot, 
shriek, or boom struck into my ears with a steady 
violence, like blow after blow from a great fist; 
and what was most distressing in it was, not the 
sounds, but their succession and the necessity of 
counting them in my brain, waiting for them with 
all my nerves. The big sound, like the thud of a 
bomb, struck in with a measure of its own, at slower 
intervals than the hooters; and I waited with most 
anxiety for that shattering fall and rebound, whose 
place I could never quite calculate, between two 
or on the end of the second recurrent gasps. I 
covered my ears, but the sound, a little deadened, 
penetrated them in the same dismal rhythm; and 

3.51 



Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands. 

in my mind there was only a great emptiness, in 
which a vapour of suspense drifted to and fro. 

But for those sounds I should have been per- 
fectly happy in Dover. It is a place of winds, sea, 
and cliffs; it is alive, and the life in it varies with 
every tide, the beauty in it comes and goes with 
every change of hour or weather. The cramped 
beach seems to have lost all that Matthew Arnold 
found in it, except those 

edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world 

which are still to be discerned there. And then, 
one day, a wind brings back some of its motion to 
the sea, and again, with Arnold : 

you hear the grating roar 
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
At their return, up the high strand, 
Begin, and cease, and then again, 
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
The eternal note of sadness in. 

Sadness, however, is not the characteristic of the 
sea at Dover, nor of the white cliffs, battlemented 
and crowned with their castle, still alive. They 
change colour and aspect daily and nightly, with an 
uncertainty that is full of surprise and delight. 
And the place, the streets, the people, is there not 
some pleasant suggestion of France, not only in the 
Calais and Ostend boats, persevering travellers to 
and fro, but in the actual aspect of things ^ The 
streets are good to walk in, especially at night. 
352 



Dover Cliffs. 

They are dimly lighted, and they have an old aspect, 
some of them are dark and narrow, and all wind to 
and fro, and some climb the hill or disappear under 
archways or come out unexpectedly upon the 
docks, or upon the sea-front. From the sea-front 
you see the crude Hne of window-lights in the 
barrack on the Western Cliff, and on the East Cliff 
nothing but a leash of lights, dropping down from 
the Castle like the tail of a comet. The people 
walk at nights, in the wandering friendly way of 
most sea-towns, up and down certain streets. On 
market-day, which is Saturday, they walk up and 
down past the noisy fish-sellers in the market- 
place, sometimes turning down Snargate Street. 
On Sunday night, after church-hours, all the young 
men and women walk up and down on the sea- 
front, or rather on the road and pavement which 
keep them back a little further from the sea. The 
lights are dim; over the sea they seem brighter 
as they come and go; as they will come and go 
all night ; for Dover is never asleep. That gate 
of England is always open, and there are always 
warders awake at the gate. 

1908. 



THE END 



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